


Gravity's Just A Habit

by joisbishmyoga



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Edorazzi's twin au spinoff, Felix/Nino - Freeform, I do not dance and my music skills are minimal and it shows, I have not seen the second season yet, I love food and it shows, M/M, giving ppl too many competencies but the canon did it first, mixing some of the English with the French oops, no accent marks we die like people who have no patience for the character map function, not a slow burn I am sorry, running theme of Felix Agreste is kind to children fite me, some dissing of some things but I am not sorry bc the characters need opinions, sorry Bridgette but I love this pairing too so you are Mlle. Not In This Verse, warning akuma are darker than canon and I will put possible triggers in chapter notes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-29
Updated: 2019-01-20
Packaged: 2019-09-02 00:10:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 32,535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16775707
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/joisbishmyoga/pseuds/joisbishmyoga
Summary: When Felix's dance teacher assigns original projects, it's exactly Felix's bad luck that his musical tastes make the project impossible.  Until Adrien makes the obvious suggestion.In other words, how Felix met Nino: a story of seeing past each other's assumptions.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> edorazzi’s twin AU is a pic series on her tumblr where Adrien (canon Chat) and Felix (original concept Chat, from the 2D trailer and a lot of concept sketches) are identical twins who share Plagg through accident of luck. Meaning he latched onto his Chosen’s aura before he finished leaping from the box, only to discover there were two kids instead of one and he didn’t know which kid Fuu had chosen. Cue quantum physics shenanigans, and there are two rings and two people able to take turns being Chat.
> 
> (Her twin AU does something similar for Marinette and 2D-concept Bridgette, making them cousins similar enough for Tikki to do the same thing, but this is the AU AU option where there’s only Marinette and no Bridgette, because I don’t want to break a 15-year-old’s heart I mean come on.)
> 
> Chat Nuit, Chat Jour, and Chat Noir: Ladybug and the Chats use Chat Nuit/Jour to differentiate the two Chats. No one else knows there’s two of them, so the general public calls him Chat Noir.
> 
> Mlle. = Mademoiselle, which is a term for young women that the French gov’t is apparently trying to phase out? I will still be using it because I studied French in the 1990s when music was bad and fashion was worse and no one was quite sure what the internet did.  
> Mme. = Madame, which is French for Mrs./Ms.  
> M. = Monsieur
> 
> As always, many thanks to Waywren for beta and listening-to-my-writing-woes work.

"I have decided," Mme. Balon announced near the end of Friday's cooldown session, "that all of you are advanced enough to experiment with doing your own choreography." Next to Felix, Rose winced, and Madame cast a glance at her that had the girl snapping back into proper posture as if she'd been struck. "Each of you will select a song three to four minutes long and compose a suitable dance for it over the next three months. If enough of them show sufficient skill, they'll be included in your summer recital. If not," she flicked her fingers as if brushing a bit of lint away, "eh! We will have the usual repertoire at hand. No pressure, as the children say."

No pressure, certainly, Felix thought with amused sarcasm. It was dance class, there was always pressure, and this... this was a challenge. An  _ interesting  _ one. He could perhaps use  [that Rin' song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0T6Fq4eoJTw) Adrien had found mixed in his ridiculous anime music recs on youtube...

"And so that you do not lose your inspiration to other choreographers,"  _ plagiarize entire sequences _ , she may as well have said, "I want you to select music I won't know. Something fresh! Something new! Something I will not hear on the radio or through the Google."

... There went that idea.

Then she clapped her hands and smiled at them, and Felix stood to line up with the rest of the class neatly before the barre. "Thank you for the lesson, Mme. Balon," he chorused politely with them.

"You're welcome," she replied. "Have a good weekend, and I will see you on Monday. Dismissed."

Felix filed out with the boys and into the changing room. Music was going to be a problem, but he could at least make some executive decisions immediately. It would be a solo, of course. Not that the Madame had insisted, and in fact Ivan was probably already hoping to do a duet with Mylene, but Felix hadn't been made for group work. Duets he could manage (he was used to operating with Adrien, and had taken the male lead in dances before, and somehow he'd managed to translate that to fighting alongside Ladybug), but this would be more like a school project. Creative control was in his hands here, and working with someone -- having to cede his ideas and cooperate, ugh -- would just end up in arguments and tears.

He was too much like his father for it not to.

The legwarmers and thick cardigan sweater Felix took from his locker were the two ugliest items in his wardrobe, since even Gabriel couldn't make leg warmers stylish after the 80s. To be fair, he'd tried, using the elegant silvers and grays most of Felix's shirts came in, but practicality had won. They'd turned out perfect for a Parisian February, at least, and there were times when Felix wished he could wear them during Chat Noir’s night shift.

"What ideas do you guys have?" Ivan asked, his voice carrying easily over the clanging of lockers and old plumbing. "I mean," a wave of salt-musk scent billowed out as he pulled his dance shirt over his head, muffling his voice, "the music's gonna be hard to get, right?"

Nathaniel shrugged. "There's buskers all over," he pointed out quietly. "Or indie songs online."

"Oh. Huh." Ivan tipped his head. "Yeah, that's a good thought. I think Mylene downloads some of that."

"Ten euros Sabrina will get hers from Chloe," a boy on the other side of the locker bay said, which was a bet Felix was not taking. From the shower of socks getting thrown over the lockers, no one else was either.

(Felix did not throw his socks at the hapless idiot. He balled them up into the laundry pocket of his dance bag, and changed into fresh ones for his return home. If only the showers here weren’t so very…  _ well-used _ . His dampness was subsumed right now by the warmth in his muscles, but by the time he got home his clothes and hair would be clinging to him, all sticky and limp and disgusting. At the very least he could minimize how much his socks would squish.)

A clean shower, Felix promised himself as he left with the stream of the rest of the boys. Pristine and dry and private. And  _ soon _ .

The girls’ changing room was closer to the school’s entrance than the boys’, but girls somehow took that tiny bit longer every single time, so they streamed out in a cloud of sweet and floral colognes as the boys were passing. Mylene cuddled right up to Ivan, her tiny hands barely able to close around his forearm, and wrinkled her nose just as always, but otherwise most of the girls were clustered hopefully around Allegra, who was still picking hair pins out of her long blonde braid.

“Sorry, no,” Allegra said as several of the boys lit up, before any of them could get a word out. Felix completely failed to be surprised. “I won’t have the time to do anyone else’s music.” She looked honestly sorry.

“Aw, but Allegra…!” “Maybe some friend recs? You’ve got a whole orchestra you play with, right?”

“Really, I don’t think Madame assigned this just for everyone to jump me--!”

Sabrina ducked past, showing the good sense to just go to Chloe instead, and Felix fell into step with her mostly so their combined momentum could get them past the crowd. Ivan stepped up to take point, Mylene nearly invisible in his wake, and they all escaped into the frigid, gray afternoon.

They split up again almost immediately: Sabrina heading left for home, Ivan and Mylene across the street to the Starbucks, and Felix went right for the limo idling across two parallel parking spaces.

He paused with his hand on the door as a thought occurred to him.

There was absolutely no way he’d be allowed to leave the mansion to look for music. Who knew what schedule updates Natalie would shove under his nose when he stepped inside. And while he did download music from the internet, he always searched by movie names on proper commercial platforms like Apple. He had very little idea how to trawl the depths of the internet for ‘indie music’ without riddling his computer with viruses and wasting far too many hours of his life inflicting twenty-liter-bucket drums and repetitive acoustic guitar chord progressions upon himself.

But his  _ shower _ .

But his  _ homework _ .

Comfort warred with duty for a long moment, then Felix’s hand fell from the door handle. "I'll walk, thank you," he reluctantly told the driver. Duty always won out for Agrestes, after all. Then, "actually, wait a moment. Do you know where I might find a high number of buskers?"

The man (not Le Gorille, who stayed with Adrien as the more popular twin, but a deceptively slender man who’d never given Felix his name) shrugged. “Tourist places, I’d expect. Metro stations.”

Urgh. Tourists and crowds, two of his least favorite things. And he was going to have to walk them looking like some Bohemian dance student. … Well, at least he was very unlikely to be recognized as Felix Agreste.

He lingered at the corner long enough for the driver to have either parked or called in a backup guard to trail Felix, then headed out roughly in the direction of the Louvre. Maybe he’d get lucky and the museum would have attracted more classically-styled musicians to its environs.

Less than an hour later, he regretted ever hoping that. Why did he always forget what his luck was like?

Felix leaned against the stone base supporting a pair of columns on the facade of the Louvre, the corner of the building itself blocking most of the clamour and noise of buskers clashing around its glass pyramid entrance. He could usually ignore it -- usually barely even  _ noticed  _ \-- but this time he was looking for music, and coming up woefully, painfully short.

Forget mere appeal: every busker he could hear -- and every one he’d heard in the parks and plazas he’d passed on his walk --  _ appalled _ . Insipid covers of American pop songs, accordionists trying to capitalize on tourists at the tired end of overhyped romantic Valentine vacations, the aforementioned twenty-liter-bucket drums (fortunately only heard in distant echoes from the depths of a Metro station as he passed by its entrance), folk singers trying to win with sentiment rather than skill...

He let his head fall back, staring tiredly at the sign on the archway overhead. Upside-down and in plain capitalization, it looked for a moment like  _ Papillon _ , but no, it was  _ Pavillon _ , gold copperplate lettering on polished black granite.

Behind him, in the plaza, glass shattered in a burst of screaming.

“I am Le Pavillion!”

Felix dropped his face into his hands. “I hate you so much right now, Plagg,” he muttered at his ring and its seeping bad luck. “Transform me.”

It took a moment, one in which Felix took to climb the few steps up and get out of sight (and in which he heard a distinctly unfortunate sewer-grate-sounding crash from the direction of his unseen bodyguard), before Plagg came streaming over the fleeing crowd’s heads and into the ring in a streak of shadow. The transformation wiped the stickiness and tiredness from Felix’s body, pulling his hair up into two thick spikes; sound sharpened as the magic condensed into his hair product and let the spikes act as if they were actual cat ears. His fingertips throbbed once, a soft pinch that assured his claws were firmly in place, then his belt tugged at his hips and resettled his entire sense of body and balance to have a second, more catlike mode available.

He perhaps hated that last bit most of all. It felt too natural in a way that didn’t work once he was normal again.

Plucking the bell off his suit, he flicked it open with one claw under a tiny catch in the seam. Instead of a clapper, a flat surface divided the inside into an empty dome and a second, half-round bell, which had surprised Chat Nuit for a moment the first time he’d found it. The gold was etched with complex patterns that looked a lot like overlapping cat scratches, and so far he’d only figured out its calling function.

“Ladybug, there’s an akuma at the Louvre. It’s shattered the pyramid and taken over the plaza. It’s…” Chat Nuit peered out around his pillar, then ducked back into cover. “... a winged lion-person spitting fire into the entrance. I can’t see any fire exits from my position, but I’m going to assume people are trapped inside.” And even if they were hurrying to fire exits, smoke killed more than fire. “... Get here quickly.”

He closed and replaced the bell, then stepped out of the little corner (on the side away from the akuma, thank you very much, he was not a reckless idiot) and clambered up the worn stone and onto the roof.

It did not give him a better view. Destroyed pyramid, winged lion akuma, fireballs down into the museum and a column of thick smoke already rising into the air, empty plaza--

Ooor it could  _ not _ be empty. Chat Nuit groaned at the bright beacon of a red ball cap tucked into one of the many arched doorways surrounding the courtyard, a flash of white-pastel plaid and that damn phone.

The akuma wasn’t looking up.

He could risk it. And so he did, scampering across the Louvre roof and circling to -- one, two, three, four, five, six doorways down, directly above the pair of  _ complete idiot civilians _ that were one of the many banes of his life. With another glance at the akuma, who was now shouting something Chat Nuit didn’t care to listen to, he dropped down right in front of Alya.

She squealed at a pitch (but, fortunately, not volume) that had his ears flattening to his head.

“What are you two even doing here?” Chat Nuit asked flatly. “Nevermind, it’s the same thing you’re always doing ‘here’, filming the akuma live. Come on, th--”

“Fire!” Nino yelped, and Chat found himself halfway up the side of the building and two alcoves over with breathless teenagers weighing heavily, one on each shoulder.

“--  air \--” Nino wheezed. Which, well, yes, Chat had just knocked the wind out of them saving their lives.

“You’re welcome,” he said, before leaping away from a second fireball, leaving deep gouges in the stonework. One hand caught on the carvings around a window; the other screeched uselessly over the glass, and Nino slid right down to Chat’s elbow and off his arm, landing on the stone ledge next to Chat’s knee.

A red blur shot past them, whizzing past Chat’s ear, and smacked into the akuma with a meaty thud. From the choked coughing, Ladybug’s yoyo had snapped its mouth shut on another fireball.

Chat just managed to yank Nino back under one arm before the yoyo looped around his waist and pulled them all to the roof.

“Glad to see you, my Lady,” Chat said, and honestly meant it. She shoved them all flat to the tiles in response, as a fireball shot over their heads and left the distinct scent of lightly-crisped hair. “ _ Really _ glad to see you.”

“Just get them out of here, Chat.” She snapped her yoyo free from his waist, wound up, and fired. It hit the akuma right in his lion snout again, but even as he was knocked backwards he caught the line in one tawny paw and yanked Ladybug sailing into the plaza.

Alya scrambled out of Chat’s grip phone-first. He ignored her excited rambling, grabbed her by the waist of her jeans, and hauled backwards. “Time for good reporters to get out of the line of fire,” he said flatly, looping Nino’s arms around his neck. “Hold on.”

Nino promptly all but choked Chat, which was perhaps the most sensible he could hope to get now. So Chat leaned back, Nino muttering mild curses in his ear, dug his claws into the back wall of the Louvre, and hopped out into open air.

Alya shrieked, but not nearly as loudly as Chat’s claws did, slicing deep gouges into the stone as if it was a good hard cheese. “My footage!”

It just figured. “Ground floor,” Chat said sardonically, landing lightly on the cobblestone. “Solid ground, housewares, and no akuma.” Nino slid down his back and landed in a heap on his knees.

“Dude.  _ Dude _ ,” he repeated shakily. His eyes slid over Chat, then Alya (her belt loop still caught in one clawed finger), then to the gouged wall. “... No baton today, dude?”

Shit. “Must have left it in my other suit,” Chat replied with fake nonchalance. He got his hand free of Alya’s clothes and nudged her none-too-gently at Nino. “Get going. Don’t let her sneak back around.” And without waiting for an answer, he leapt back up the wall and climbed to the roof.

A billow of smoke blinded him for a second, but the lenses that made his eyes look inhuman kept the irritants out, so he only needed to belly-crawl a few meters to find a clear view into the plaza once more.

Ladybug landed flat on top of him like a pile of bricks, knocking them back behind the roof’s peak, all elbows and knees and the yoyo clonking Chat in the face.

Bleep you too, Plagg. Ow.

She rolled off of him with a groan, one which he could not answer because air, please, diaphragm work.

“Well, that was brilliant,” Ladybug muttered, grabbing his shoulders and hauling him in a scramble off to one side. A fireball went blasting through the roof where they’d been. “You okay?”

“Peachy,” Chat wheezed.

She exhaled in visible relief, which just went to show that sometimes she was completely blind to the obvious (or maybe Plagg just was too good at his job). “Any idea what the item is?”

He shook his head as he held up one finger, and she waited that too-long moment until his lungs remembered what air was. A couple of sucked-in breaths later, Chat managed to say, “I’ve been here all of five minutes, and most of that I was rescuing civilians. So, no.” Another breath, and he rolled up and over to all fours, rubbing at his ears with one hand to straighten them back up. “What’s his problem, did you notice?”

Ladybug nodded. “He thinks the museum stole a sculpture from one in Baghdad that got bombed.”

Over the crackle of fire and distant wailing alarms, the distinct blowtorch sound of Pavillion’s fire-spewing cut off. “I’ll blow up your museums like we blew up theirs!” the akuma roared. Then, almost as an afterthought, “Get out here and give me your Miraculous!”

Logical progression was not really a trait akuma held.

“Can you see through the smoke?” Ladybug asked.

Chat Nuit shook his head. “Night vision isn’t x-ray vision. I need the air cleared out as much as you do to look for his item.”

“And we can’t get too close. All right. Let’s hope I get a fan,” Ladybug said, before tossing her yoyo into the air. “Lucky Charm!”

The rounded-off cube that landed in her hands was the translucent red of a lollipop and spotted with opaque black spheres, and it squished slightly in her hands under the pressure of its own weight, because it was nearly the size of her head.

“Candy?” Ladybug said incredulously. “What am I supposed to do with this?”

“Put him into insulin shock, obviously,” Chat answered, rolling his eyes. Ladybug’s kwami had a worse sense of humor than Plagg. What WERE they supposed to do with a giant blob of miscooked hard candy?

Ladybug abruptly jumped up to the roof’s peak, standing tall and silhouetted by the late afternoon sun between two columns of smoke. She’d be fully visible to the akuma in the plaza below. “Hey, Pavillion!” she shouted, winding up and hurling the gob of candy like a world-class baseball pitcher. “Eat this!”

Seriously?

But the choking sounds below said it worked. Chat leapt over the peak, past another column of smoke (nearly scorching himself as fire began breaking through the shingles underfoot), and landed in the plaza to skid across the rubble of the pyramid’s shattered tempered glass. His claws caught purchase in the cobblestone, and he launched himself to circle the akuma, who was gagging on the Lucky Charm: the massive candy had glued his teeth together and his mouth shut. He was too busy clawing at his teeth to pay attention to Chat racing past, barely visible in the wavering lighting and thick smoke.

Strappy sandals, lion feet, toga, belt, dagger… museum map, just the barest edge of it peeking out from inside the toga, clearly held in place by the belt.

The line of Ladybug’s yoyo seemed almost to drift in slow motion, a loop settling around Pavillion’s shoulders and wrists before snapping back into real-time, yanking him over Chat’s head to smack into one of the twisted, broken steel beams of the former pyramid. Ladybug hauled back on the line, a soot-darkened shadow against the bright sky, and Chat went leaping for the akuma.

He couldn’t see it through a fresh billow of smoke. He didn’t need to.

Chat’s hands hit thick muscle and raked downwards. The akuma screamed, a deep ragged sound through its nose, but paper crinkled under Chat’s fingertips just as Pavillion kicked him off.

He tore the museum map in two, caught a glimpse of the butterfly struggling free of the rip, hit the ground tail first, and bounced a couple of times before coming to a dizzying, backwards-rolling halt, facedown on the stone. Ow.

There went the akuma, cleansed and pale. There went Ladybug’s chirpy farewell to it. Miraculous Ladybug sent a swarm of tickling tiny bugs that wiped away the burning scrape on his cheek and the ache in his spine and tailbone, and raked the shattered beads of glass from his hair in a semi-musical crystalline cascade.

The smoke vanished from the air. The pyramid returned intact. The artwork might well be slightly better than before: the Copycat fight had taken a layer of yellowing varnish off the Mona Lisa and made headlines for weeks.

Chat stood, brushed himself off needlessly, then stepped up to Ladybug and held out his fist as Chat Jour had started.

“Bien joué!” Ladybug cheered, and Chat delivered the proper grin and fistbump. Then her earrings beeped once: she only had a minute left. “See ya!” she added, clapping him companionably on the shoulder, and slung herself away over the Louvre’s restored roof.

Sigh. That left Chat, who hadn’t used Cataclysm, to handle clean-up. He brushed his bangs out of his eyes and headed off to deal with the civilian.

The Louvre would gladly release their provenance records if a superhero asked, right?  
  


-0-0-0-

(The docent seemed horrified that he’d thought it would take a superhero to convince them.)

(It turned out that pretty much every Babylonian city made their gates the same way, very imposing and covered in winged lions bas-reliefs, and the Louvre had had theirs since long before the Americans had bombed out Baghdad.)

(Chat wished people would just stop and consider things before they went and got akumatized. His life would be so much  _ simpler _ .)

-0-0-0-

Adrien ambushed Felix as he walked out of the bathroom, still toweling his hair dry.

“I can’t believe you were Chat today!” he crowed in delight. On his shoulder, Plagg smirked, very  _ yeah, I can’t believe you were Chat today. During the day. When you aren’t on call and it’s not your turn. You eager superhero you. _

Plagg had very expressive smirks. Felix was going to freeze all his Camembert and ruin the texture.

“I was already there,” Felix replied flatly.

“Yeah, of course, but  _ why  _ were you there? You had dance class, you always come straight home from it!”

Felix sighed and, as he draped the damp towel across the drying rack and dug pajamas out of his dresser, explained.

Adrien considered that for about a second. “Fe… you hate pop music.”

“Yes?” This was not news.

“Buskers are playing for  _ money _ . They pick whatever will get them a crowd,” Adrien said. Then, after a beat, “Meaning what’s  _ pop _ ular.”

“That doesn’t count as a pun.”

“It does when enough people think the pop,” Adrien made a popping sound that, since Felix could see the weird face he made doing it, reminded him of a kid pretending to be a fish, “in pop music means the sound effect.” Adrien grinned at him, then sobered it down to a mere smile. “But I mean, you aren’t going to find anything you like wandering around listening to buskers. Have you considered--”

“No internet.”

“... Iiiiii wasn’t going to suggest that?” Adrien lied badly. “But so, your classmate Allegra is out, I’m terrible at composing--” Since they’d paid their piano teacher to tell their father that, before the man tried to put another career on Adrien’s head, Felix allowed that to go without protest. “-- and you don’t have time to learn the entire indie music scene. What about Nino?”

“Excuse me?”

“Nino! He’s huge into music, I’m sure he can help!”

Felix stifled a groan, dropping his face into one hand. “Adrien, he’s a  _ dj _ . He does  _ remixes _ .” Monotonous dance club pop adjusted to keep the same lockstep tempo for hours on end. What was Adrien  _ thinking _ ?

For that matter, why had he suddenly fallen silent? Felix peered through his fingers at his brother, but Adrien just looked amused. Regaining Felix’s attention had apparently been the goal, because he promptly, kindly asked, “You have no idea what he does, do you?”

“If you’re going to argue the point, apparently not.” Felix sighed. Fine. He could indulge Adrien for a bit, even if it meant suffering Nino’s robot jokes unnecessarily. Ugh.

“We could sneak out as Chat-- or I mean I could carry you as Chat and we could sneak out--”

His  _ life _ . “Or you could call him,” like sane, normal people did, “and we can go tomorrow without all the hassle, and you won’t have to reschedule Chat’s patrol.”

“Well if you want to be boring about it.”

“I like boring,” Felix promptly replied.

“Fe.” Adrien’s grin gentled. “You are so in the wrong life for that.”  
  


-0-0-0-

Sure enough, bright and not particularly early the next afternoon found Adrien dragging Felix up a dim, narrow staircase in one of the ubiquitous 19th-century buildings on the far side of the school from the Agreste mansion. It smelled heavily of warm, earthy spices cut with mint and lemon, and -- as they pressed out of the way of a young couple coming downstairs, carrying a fussing toddler in a drool-soaked blue onesie -- the old wood gleamed with fresh varnish.

Nino’s mother, when they knocked at 413, was a towering round woman in a warm red soccer jersey and black skirt, who ushered them straight to Nino’s door and left them with three glass mugs of hot, foamy mint tea and a plate of sliced pears. Felix had no idea how they’d gotten there, since the woman had greeted them empty-handed and hadn’t seemed to pause anywhere near the apartment’s small kitchen.

Adrien just shrugged at him, as if to say ‘mom magic, don’t question it’. Then he bumped open the door with his hip and stomped hard on the floor, which was necessary because Nino had headphones on and wasn’t facing the door.

Nino blinked, then glanced up from the complicated mixing board he was playing with and lit up. “Yo!” he said, a bit too loud as he flipped a switch in the upper corner and pulled down his headphones. “Adrien!” Felix could see when Nino spotted him in Adrien’s shadow, because the boy’s expression closed off a bit. He kept the smile up at Adrien, at least. “What’s up, dude?”

“Nevermind,” Felix muttered. “Adrien, I’ll see you at hom--”

Adrien looped an arm around his neck and yanked him fully into Nino’s room. “Look, I know you and Nino have that whole mutual lack-of-adoration society thing going,” he told them both, somehow managing to keep all the dishes upright. “But at least give each other a chance? Please?”

Oh no not the please face, ten thousand Parisians bought useless stuff because Adrien made that face at the camera, and this one was actually authentic. How was anyone supposed to refuse the please face?

Felix slumped in Adrien’s grip, and let Adrien plop him onto Nino’s bed for lack of anywhere else to sit. The bed was made, at least, which Felix would not have expected. Though maybe Nino’s mother made it.

Adrien handed Nino one of the two glasses of mint tea he had, sat next to Felix, and started to explain.

“Oh,” Nino said within a minute. “Yeah, right, you’ve got dance with Ivan and Mylene.” He nodded knowingly, crossed his arms, and cast an arch look at Felix. “So you need music too, right?”

Felix should’ve started discussing payment. He really should’ve. But… “You compose?” he asked, trying not to sound too disbelieving. “Original work?”

Nino shrugged, waving the notion away a bit. “I guess you could call it that,” he said. “It’s mostly I like that guitar riff and this bass line sort of stuff, but if you want vocals I’ll have to use this Japanese AI singing program and it comes out with a really weird accent.” He paused, then one side of his mouth quirked up into a smirk. “Although…”

“If you call me a robot again I’m leaving,” Felix told him flatly, and somehow managed to ignore Adrien’s pout.

“I’d just be riffing on a song the program’s already got anyway,” Nino replied easily, still smirking. “Right. No robot.” He leaned back in his chair. “What ideas do you have?”

Not much. Really not much. Other than being a solo.

“... Okay… How about what are your favorite dance moves?” Nino tried after a too-long moment of silence. “What sort of stuff are they supposed to mean? Like,” he thought a bit, “Like okay, dude, if you want to do a lot of fast spins I’ll need to know not to do something slow.”

“I’m aware,” he snapped. Just how stupid did Nino think he was? He was a  _ dancer _ , just because he didn’t know Nino could compose anything good didn’t mean he didn’t understand music. He sighed explosively, blowing at his bangs, and leaned forward. “Fine.” Nino was going to make this project a pain in the neck, but at least it’d be mutual. “I actually like the challenge of slower movements…”

Nino nodded, but, “Slower is harder?” he asked.

_ Arrgh _ . “Move over.” Felix set aside his tea, pushed Nino out of the way of the laptop half-hidden by a jumble of wiring and mystery electronics, and went straight to Firefox. Something easy, something obvious, something --  _ ugh  _ \-- popular. CATS had an official video edition and a lot of the songs were up on youtube. “Here,” he said, stepping out of the way and putting the video on fullscreen. “You can see the effort in  [this solo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwAldIBJUdE) , especially at the beginning.” The white costume and strong contrast in lighting made it obvious, but Felix made sure to point out, “She doesn’t tremble nearly as much or breathe as hard when she starts moving more quickly. Speed has its own challenges, but often a layman won’t catch a mistake unless you fall over. Slow can make problems obvious.”

“Huh,” Nino said, watching the dancer with a furrowed brow. The clip itself was short, only about a minute and a half, but Nino clicked it to play through a second time while he thought. “Yeah,” he eventually said, leaning back. “Okay, makes sense. So,” his expression smoothed out again as he glanced back up at Felix. “Mood list, move list, instrument list--”

“Instrument list?” Felix repeated.

“For all I know, you have a thing for banjo,” Nino said solemnly. Then, with a wince, “Please don’t have a thing for banjo.”

“Much as I live to crush your low expectations,” Banjo. Really. “I do not.”

Nino sighed in mock relief. “So yeah. Homework assignment. Wow I feel dirty now,” he muttered as an aside. He pulled out his phone and opened the calendar app, visible reflected in his glasses. “Okay, Ivan and Mylene have my Saturdays… Sunday’s shorter, but I can pencil you in for the afternoon, and this Thursday’s free too after school. This going to be a solo?” Felix raised a brow, but didn’t need to answer. “So slow-ish, solo, no banjos and no robots, and if you don’t know what an instrument’s called you can just write down ‘low trumpety thing’ or something. You want Thursday or Sunday?”

“Sundays will be fine.”

Nino nodded, biting his lip as he tapped away at his phone. “I think this Thursday too, if that works. I’ve got Ivan and Mylene at seven, but if you’ve got any time between four and six-thirty we can go over your lists and do, like, actual work on Sunday.”

“Five will do.”

“Okay. Great.” Nino set his phone aside. “That leaves one more thing. How much are you gonna pay me?”

Felix had no idea what the going rate was for musicians at all, much less freelance teenage ones. But surely it couldn’t be minimum wage, and then he’d hardly get a friendly discount like Ivan and Mylene no doubt had...

Well. Minimum wage was, what, about ten euros?

“Fifteen an hour, time cards required, paid in two installments and with a 25% bonus if the piece is added to the summer recital,” Felix suggested. Nino’s eyes widened in shock. “And you can input hours on the honor system.” Felix let a smirk tug at his mouth. “You wouldn’t defraud your best friend’s family.” Offended rage flashed over Nino’s face, but Adrien -- who Felix had almost forgotten was there -- flicked Felix sharply in the ear. “I mean that in the nicest way possible, of course,” Felix added, not entirely untruthfully.

Plenty of people would gleefully take advantage of the Agreste fortune when setting prices. Nino wouldn’t be one of them, not if he kept Adrien in mind when negotiating, but if he forgot he wasn’t dealing  _ only  _ with Felix…

Nino’s expression was thunderous, but he bit out, “Five extra euros for every time you insult me like that again.”

“Five fewer for every time you insult me back,” Felix countered, “which makes it a moot point.”

“... Deal,” Nino finally grumbled.

“Good.” Felix did not offer his hand to shake, nor did Nino. “I’ll see you on Thursday, then. And at school.” He inclined his head to Adrien. “Have fun. I’ll see you later.”

And with that, Felix gladly left.  
  


-0-0-0-

Monday passed quietly, with only normal minor classroom drama, leaving Felix plenty of time to start brainstorming Nino’s lists. Nino, he decided quickly, had no idea what he was doing: it would surely be easier if Felix wrote down the songs he liked, maybe some of his favorite dance roles, and go from there. Tuesday also passed quietly, snow flurries in the morning giving way to thick clouds and occasional frigid breezes in the afternoon, but that didn’t last into the evening.

Chat Nuit was well into the western loop of his patrol when an explosion knocked out three square blocks of city lights half a kilometer to the north. Even at this distance, he could easily hear something very, very large screeching near the center of the blackout.

“ _ STAY UP! _ ”

Not the weirdest cry an akuma had ever made, but definitely in the top ten.

He tapped his bell open and made the call as he leapt over a boulevard into the darkened sector. “Hey, Ladybug--”

“ _ I see it _ ,” she replied. “ _ Five minutes _ .”

She had to be at the far end of her route, up on one of the hills or skyscrapers, to be so far and still able to see the blackout.

Five minutes, then. Chat could hold an akuma for five minutes.

He landed high in a winter-bare tree, one of a dozen crammed into a tiny park space where three roads met. The pale buildings lining the street ahead were four stories tall; the darker one behind, with wrought-iron balconies, was six.

The disk rising up behind the taller building was not the moon. It was a blank-masked akuma, its face little more than a pair of triangular holes for eyes and a wedge of a nose on a circle of silvery plastic larger than Chat. The silvery shape was bright enough, even in the blackout and starless night, that it took a moment for Chat to see it was set into an angular head twice the size of a car and painted some dark color-- he couldn’t tell what in the low light.

Blue light blazed to life in each eye, because of  _ course  _ an akuma had to have that sort of overdone cinematic flair, and the light gleamed off the curves of sharply-pointed fingers as they curled over the rooftop, because it had to do that  _ too _ .

Seven stories tall, Chat guessed, as it peered over the building, the roof crunching in its grip. It paused. Its eerie gaze dropped to the building. Then it squeezed the roof, strained beams snapping in its hands and people inside screaming, and hooted with mouthless glee. And it grabbed for a fresh section of roof.

“Stay up!” it repeated, and tore the rest of the roof off.

A child. A very  _ young  _ child. Some days Chat could just rip into Papillon with his bare hands.

Why couldn’t Plagg have given both his Chosen batons, Chat wondered -- not for the first time -- and pounced. He only had claws. He wasn’t about to use those on a child, even one seven stories tall and made of boxy plastic. A baton, he could’ve used to break the akuma’s grip and push him away towards clearer playspaces.

Claws and himself. Great odds there.

“Hey, Stayup!” he yelled, hopping onto what was left of a chimney just out of the akuma’s reach. (He hoped.) “Look at me!” He waved wildly, lashing his tail and hopping about on the small bit of brick. “Don’t I look fun?”

Papillon’s mark flared onto Stayup’s face.

“ _ Makulus! _ ” it (he?) shrieked, and lunged.

Chat bit back an extremely not-child-safe word and threw himself backwards out of the way. Stayup was fast, because that was Chat’s life,  _ everything was cinematic tropes working against him _ . Once he cleared the roof and sailed over the street Stayup was in, he could see the rest of the akuma: Transformers meets Godzilla, oddly stubby-limbed and wearing a superhero cape that Chat was not going to risk his neck against. His luck, it’d be less fabric and more five-story guillotine.

“Makulus!” it shrieked again. “Get makulus, I stay up!”

No baton, no harmless way to fight the akuma, and no Ladybug yet.

Chat turned tail and fled.

“Ladybug.” He didn’t need to open or even touch the bell, the suit was sentient enough in a pinch. “Heading south and for the river. Broad streets only: Stayup isn’t being careful.”

“ _ Three minutes! _ ” came her response.

Chat’s night vision began to brighten with ambient city light as he passed an angel bas-relief at the end of a park. The road forked here, one wider with trees marching down both sides, and Chat’s claws dug into the fanned stonework of the road as he scrambled for speed.

The ambient city light was throwing his shadow across the cobblestones in front of him.

It wasn’t city light at all.

He risked a glance over his shoulder, a flash of light like the sun before Plagg dropped the night vision and let him see the ball of energy crackling at the akuma’s throat. Bright green, Avada-green, and Chat leapt over a car and onto the sidewalk as soon as the crackle changed pitch and it fired.

It did not help. The beam was the size of a city bus, off-kilter and clipping Chat in the shoulder, and it felt like a shot of adrenaline straight to his heart.

Stayup must have anti-sleep beams. Painless and harmless, and enough of a jolt of energy that Chat got an extra boost of speed to escape.

Papillon had not thought the magic part of this akuma through. Though he probably didn’t need to, seven stories of mecha Godzilla was more than enough to make for a very injured cat.

He ignored the next shot, letting it sizzle through him as he ran into a roundabout and past the Metro entrance. Another block would get them to the Trocadero, the river, and the Tower.

Mecha were electronic enough that maybe knocking Stayup into the river would do something.

The shots were coming faster, he thought, getting grazed by another as he raced into the open space of the Trocadero Gardens. The Tower was a spear of light rising hazily into the sky beyond the trees; the blocky facade of one end of the Trocadero reflected golden in evening uplighting. The wind blew icy off the Seine, a buffeting gust that stung at the rims of Chat’s eyes, eyes he belatedly realized were open so wide he could feel the tension in the muscles around them.

His heart should not be pounding this hard after running just three blocks. Neither should -- he skidded across an iced-over puddle, flailed, and landed halfway down the hill to the river -- neither should his  _ head _ .

There were  _ legal limits _ on energy shots at Starbucks. Stayup’s laser wasn’t harmless at all.

“ _ Makulus! _ ”

_ Arrgh _ . “Ladybug hurry  _ up _ ,” he hissed.

A line came whizzing out of the dark, looped around his chest, and yanked him across the river. “Sorry I’m late!” Ladybug said, letting him catch himself on the flagpole next to hers. “Wow that guy’s big. What’d I miss?”

Stayup howled in frustration.

Chat’s hands shook where they gripped the freezing pole. “Little kid, giant lasers, don’t get hit; they’re like pure adrenaline.” He could hear his pulse pounding in his ears, far too fast. “One more and I might have a heart attack.”

That got a stricken glance out of her. But her chin firmed up, and she turned her gaze to the akuma wading into the river. “Okay, water doesn’t work,” she muttered, eyes flicking back and forth. “Reach, leverage, speed--”

“He’s a lot faster than he looks.”

“Aren’t they always.” She looked behind them and up, and Chat could almost follow her train of thought. “Right. Mime again. Pin and take.”

One Tower, coming down.

Miracle of miracles, Ladybug’s luck won out over Chat’s after that. His must’ve been worn out by the short chase, because they lured Stayup easily to the Tower’s park without Chat getting hit by another laser beam. Ladybug kept Stayup in roughly the right spot by dint of being colorful and athletic, bouncing in circles around him, and Chat--

“Cataclysm!”

\--rusted the Tower’s footings and brought it collapsing down atop Stayup with a long, metal-tearing groan and crash.

There was a tiny spot of mottled pastel blue and yellow tangled in the akuma’s dorsal spines, up near his shoulder where Chat couldn’t have seen it from the front. It turned out to be a knit baby blanket not much larger than a towel, which ripped easily to release the butterfly for purification. Then the Miraculous Ladybug spell restored the Tower, dragged the extra energy out of Chat in a wave of welcome exhaustion and pain relief, then swarmed over the 20-meter robot to leave a very tiny figure.

The little boy, tear-streaked and wearing nothing but a drool- and food-stained shirt and a diaper, couldn’t have been more than a year and a half old. He blinked huge, dark eyes at them, looked around, and his tiny face crumpled.

Ladybug paled. “Oh no, no, honey, don’t cry--” she begged, wringing her hands.

The toddler burst into tears.

It was really the most reasonable response Chat had seen out of a freshly-rescued victim yet. “Hey, buddy,” Chat said, stepping closer and crouching. “It’s been a bad night, hasn’t it.”

“ _ Chat you’re going to scare him _ ,” Ladybug hissed.

Chat opened his arms and offered the baby the kindest look he could muster. “Let’s get you home. It’s scary out here.”

“Chat--!”

The baby stumbled into his arms, still sobbing inconsolably, and Chat carefully hugged him close, wrapping the small blanket around him. One black-tipped tuft of hair, the one closer to the child, flattened to block the piercing wails. “Yeah, I know. Everything’s terrible right now. We’ll fix it.” He stood, letting the child cry into his shoulder, and turned to Ladybug. “You’d best get going, my Lady. I’ll recharge and take the kid home.”

She hesitated, biting her lip. “You sure you know where…?”

“Frantic parents at the center of the blackout area. I’m pretty sure I can figure it out.”

She hesitated another moment, but, “If you’re sure,” she said slowly. Then, “You’re really kind, you know that?” Chat blinked, but she lassoed a nearby streetlamp and swooped away before he could think of a response.

He rubbed the crying toddler’s back gently, being careful of his claws, ignored the gunk starting to drip onto his shoulder, and headed across the bridge for the roof of the Trocadero. Between the darkness and the cold, the park was empty anyway: he should have enough time to detransform and feed Plagg, even with the child’s crying pinpointing his location, and the baby was too young to identify him.

“You know this is probably why you qualified, right?” Plagg said, once he fell out of the ring and onto the concrete roof.

Qualified? “What, to be Chosen?” Felix grumbled, digging a wheel of Camembert out of the small purse he’d taken to transforming with for patrol. ( _ “But you can just buy it at a shop, Fe.” “It’s called planning ahead, Adrien. How many times have you been stuck searching for a shop in the middle of a fight?” “Er... _ ”) He tossed the cheese downwind of the baby, so neither of them had to smell it, and slumped in place. “Because I’m not a raging jerk to little kids?”

“That’s rarer than you think,” Plagg agreed. He gulped down half the wheel. “Especially at your age. Did you see how nervous Ladybug got?”

“It’s not rocket science.” Felix paused, thinking as the baby sniffled into his shirt. “He should be old enough to not trust me, though. Especially with the,” Felix gestured around his eyes, where the mask made them inhuman when he was transformed.

“Suit function.” Plagg shrugged, chewing more slowly at the next piece of cheese. “Helps civilians take ‘run for cover’ more seriously, and if children are too little to understand they still won’t run away from you and into danger.”

“That’s…” Helpful. But, “Worrying. Is that why people keep agreeing to be akumatized? Even when they know better?”

Plagg tossed the last bit up and snapped it out of the air. Chewed, swallowed, and lay back mock-lazily. “And why Paris almost fell for the guy’s stupid villain speech back with Stoneheart,” he said agreeably, but (Felix noticed) without actually confirming or denying. “But cheer up, we’ve all got it equally so it cancels out when we fight.” Plagg smirked at him, upside-down. “And it’s helping you right now. So don’t sweat it.”

Don’t sweat it, he said. As if magic trust wasn’t going to keep Felix up at night with the implications. “Just transform me and let’s go.”

Plagg was kind enough to run the transformation without all the posing for once, just up and over Felix’s body without disturbing the baby. The baby shifted and wiped his nose off on the suit’s shoulder anyway.

“I feel you, kid.”

It didn’t take long to return to the epicenter of the akuma attack, even trudging slowly at street level for the child’s comfort, and the parents were even easier to identify: nearly a dozen of their apartment neighbors were out in the street, phones open to news sources -- the Ladyblog and AkumaApp as well as streaming tv -- and eyes on the streets south. A ragged cheer went up when Chat got into view, and under the watchful eyes of Officer Raincomprix and all the neighbors, he solemnly checked phone photos and turned the sleeping, exhausted toddler over to his parents.

“Might I suggest trickery next time?” Chat said tiredly over their effusive thanks. (He didn’t need thanks or all this misty weepiness like he’d done something special. He was being a semi-decent human being, it was part of the job.) He brushed his bangs out of his face, trying to hide his exhaustion. “Something like ‘of course it’s not bedtime, it’s pajamas and storytime in your nice dim room’?”

It’d worked on him and Adrien when they were little, after all.

“Just… think about it.”  _ Please _ . “We hate fighting children.”

Chat couldn’t take another minute in this crowd, or with all this choking sentiment. He ducked past the parents, clawed his way up the building, and crossed rooftops until the sound of the people faded into plain city noise.

There was a heat exhaust venting into a small corner between a chimney and some unused rooftop maintenance space. Chat collapsed into the space, leaning against the walls and just… taking a moment to breathe and get warm.

He didn’t want to go home.

Adrien was going to fuss and be all wibbly at him, nearly as grating as the crowd of strangers had been, and Plagg was going to be a smug little shit with  _ magic trust how was that not supposed to be utterly terrifying _ . And now Felix was going to be stuck wondering why Paris wasn’t being hit with akumatized tantruming toddlers every hour. What was Papillon doing that he was choosing so many teenagers and adults, whose fights couldn’t be spun  _ very very badly _ against Chat and Ladybug by the media?

And his suit was covered with tears and worse all over his shoulder. He felt disgusting. He was so done with everything today.  _ So done _ .

“Chat Noir?”

Plagg was laughing at him. Someone kill him now, he’d somehow picked Nino Lahiffe’s apartment to crash on. Why him.  _ Why _ .

Nino wasn’t wearing his familiar red baseball hat, but a knitted winter hat in black and green. He leaned over the low wall between Chat and the ‘unused’ maintenance balcony, well out of reach. “Wow, dude, you look beat. Lemme get you a water or something?”

Chat could only stare wearily. Where was the aggravating snide cheer?

Nino vanished, but Chat didn’t move. He wouldn’t until Nino came back with his phone. Alya would be on the line, or perhaps on Skype, firing questions-- that would surely be enough impetus to get him moving. Alya as Stayup laser. Heh. An akuma firing little Alyas, like Adrien’s anime chibi things,  _ pew pew pew just a few zillion questions Chat Noir! _ Terrifying.

It was very possible he was a bit loopy from the adrenaline crash. Twitchy, loopy, exhausted… yeah. Adrenaline crash. Stayup laser crash.

“Hey.”

Nino was back.

Chat blinked slowly at him, not quite comprehending the small towel hanging damply off Nino’s offered hand. Or the tote bag on his arm, or the glass mug of tea steaming in his other hand.

Nino wiggled the wet cloth at him. “You’ve got yuck on your suit,” he said. “Babies. Can’t help it, you know?”

Slowly, Chat leaned forward and pulled the cloth free, then wiped his shoulder down. Nino just set the tote on the concrete at the foot of the wall, on Chat’s side, and reached into it. “Water,” he said, taking out a sports bottle, then putting it back and pulling up the corner of a thick patchwork quilt in reds and browns. “Blanket. Not that you’ll want to sleep there, it’s cold and wet and, you know, hard as rocks. But you can at least have something to wrap up in, dude.” He let the corner of the quilt fall back into the tote bag, and held out the glass mug. “Mint tea. Freshly made, if you can have mint. Mama won’t be mad if you can’t. But, you know, hot drink if you want.”

“... Thanks.”

Nino smiled, soft and bright and  _ kind _ , and Chat could only think one thing.

_ Oh no. _

_ He’s hot. _


	2. Chapter 2

Felix slept heavily that night, too deeply for it to be entirely natural, and dragged himself in to school on Wednesday with a smaller coffee than usual, a simple café crème untainted by energy shots.

He was a bit burnt out on stimulants today, considering. The coffee was only to prevent a withdrawal headache, but he’d rather be seen as groggy and out of it -- which most people would probably just interpret as more prickly than normal -- than to feel the artificial energy affecting his body.

So he sat tiredly at his usual seat, and watched Nino slide in next to Adrien, all friendly jostling and ‘dude’s, and waited for Nino to start bragging about how he’d totally hung out with Chat Noir last night.

And waited.

And waited.

And waited through Thursday, as well.

Clearly, Nino must be talking about it at times when Felix wasn’t in earshot. It would hardly be difficult, as Felix maintained a careful lack of proximity to that little cohort outside of class (since Marinette had that painfully obvious crush, Alya was well on her way to becoming a paparazzi for superheroes, and Nino…)

One would think he’d hear Alya screeching from across the courtyard, though.

The proverbial shoe dropped about half an hour after Felix got home for lunch, when he was halfway through his math homework and Adrien came bouncing into his room (late from school, with a trace of mustard still at the corner of his mouth).

“Fe!” Adrien jumped onto Felix’s bed, landing flat on his stomach, sending pillows flying and rumpling the rarely-used blankets. “You ran into Nino the other night? Why didn’t you tell me?”

_ Gee, I wonder. _ Felix let his head fall into one hand, the math problem left half-solved. “I see he’s started bragging about it now.”

Adrien blinked. “What?” Then he jolted upright. “No! C’mon, Nino wouldn’t do that. Isn’t doing that,” he corrected himself, metaphorical ruffled feathers resettling. “He was doodling you in class today,” Adrien explained. “Chat-you, I mean.”

He was?   


… Wait, Felix had sort of seen, in the margins of the files where they were supposed to be able to take notes, that Nino’s hadn’t been legible today. “Those shapes were supposed to be me?”

“Well not all of you! Just like, your weird hair and stuff.” Because that was so much better. “I managed to deflect him with a comment about the boots.”

“I really will kill Plagg for those.” Pink paw pads. Or, as Adrien called them, toe beans.

It could have been worse. Plagg kept threatening to trade the pink pads for stripper thigh-high boots.   


(Someday Felix was going to actually find that reminder, that it could have been worse, convincing.)

“You’re going to kill Plagg for everything. I don’t think it’ll work,” Adrien was saying. “I hope you didn’t have a fight with Nino. I couldn’t get him to tell me  _ anything _ , but he doesn’t seem to be mad at Chat…” Adrien mused.

Subtle Adrien was not. Annoying, he would be, if left unanswered, but that could also be funny… Hm. Unless he started going around as Chat quizzing Nino about their meetings. That would be supremely stupid, and ruin their reputation for not actually being insane despite running around in magic leather dressed as a cat.

“I stopped on his roof,” Felix said as normally as possible. “He gave me a washcloth for the gunk the akuma victim left on me. I used it and left. The end.”

Adrien’s face fell.  _ Sorry, Adrien, no sordid tales of your best friend and your brother getting along for two whole minutes. It’s antagonism the entire way down. _

After a long moment, Adrien seemed to accept there was nothing more to be said, and he flopped back onto Felix’s bed and sighed. Oh well. “Speaking of the akuma victim…”

“Must we.”

“I’m meeting Ladybug at Alya’s place to record a PSA on that trickery thing you said, so. Yeah.” Adrien ran a hand through his bangs, ruffling them up onto his forehead before letting gravity drop them back down to the sides. He was very carefully not looking at Felix, which was very rude of him, ignoring Felix’s neutral face of displeasure like that. “How’s that even work?”

“What?” It… worked exactly like it sounded. Why did Adrien need to ask? “It’s trickery. You tell the kid it’s pajama and storytime, keep the lights low, and speak quietly while you read. It’s exactly how we used to get put to bed.”

Adrien gave him a strange look. “But we never got put to bed unless it was a babysitter.”

“We never got ordered to bed,” Felix corrected, deciding not to reminisce about the chaos and mayhem inflicted upon hapless professional nannies. “We--” If Adrien was going to play clueless, maybe a more recent example. “What am I like when we’re sick?”

Adrien blinked, brow furrowing. “Well…” he said slowly. “You always develop killer headaches, so we have to break out the curtains, and keep the screens dim and quiet, and I drive you nuts when I get jittery... hey, waitaminute--”

Thank you, universe. “Yes, exactly, Adrien. Pretend the kid’s me when we’re sick, only nicer and you don’t have to stay in the bed.”

“You trick me! Felix--!”

“I really don’t, but it works the same as if I had.”

Adrien grabbed a pillow, Felix dodged his first swing and grabbed another for defense, and they fought until they had to run to get back to school on time.   
  


-0-0-0-

When Felix arrived promptly at five minutes to four that afternoon, Nino’s room was considerably cleaner than it had been on Sunday. The wiring trailing everywhere was gone, the mixing board set on its side next to a firmly-shut closet door, and the only electronic item left was the laptop open on the desk. Bohemian Rhapsody was playing at a surprisingly decent volume, but… well, maybe not so surprising, actually. Felix supposed that Nino had to have at least a modicum of sense about protecting his hearing.

“Hey, dude, come on in,” Nino said, not looking away from the laptop, intent on whatever he was watching. Felix had an impression of browns and tans and movement, but the angle was bad and he couldn’t see either the screen or its reflection in Nino’s glasses properly. “I found this thing on youtube,” he continued as Felix stepped slowly inside. “Some  [ ballet duet ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9cA9Z4bNzk) \--”

Oh  _ ugh _ . “Do not talk to me about that travesty.”

Nino exhaled explosively and let his head thunk back against the wall. “Oh thank god it’s  _ not  _ just me,” he told the ceiling with unmitigated relief.

Wait what?

“I mean. Dude. Okay. It’s not a bad dance,” Nino went on, tipping his face towards Felix and gesturing at the screen, “Alya and Marinette like it, and my mom. It’s very pretty and I guess it’s skilled, I wouldn’t know but y’know, they’re professionals, but what kind of moron decided to do this song as a love duet thing?!”

“... I’m sure the credits have that information,” Felix said warily.

“Well yeah but I don’t wanna know his name, I might be able to keep pretending he just doesn’t know English. Even though it’s the English Nationals.” Nino all but hissed at the paused video. “Which, okay if you don’t know English that’s one thing, it’s not like I do either, but dude  _ look up a lyrics translation _ . Or maybe actually  _ listen to the music _ .” He yanked the slider to the middle of the song. “Here, here it’s all hard percussion and like,  _ snap snap snap _ and they’re just,” he swayed his hand from side to side in a somewhat graceful figure-eight, “all smooth like  _ what _ . Dude. No.” He pressed play and flailed viciously at the screen. “Does that look like the video for this audio?!”

Felix let it run for nearly a minute while the video proved Nino’s point. Not that it needed proving, for once. Felix had seen amateur anime music videos (Adrien’s fault) that at least acknowledged there was a tempo to coordinate with. “It does not,” he finally said, mostly in the hope that Nino would stop the playback.

Nino didn’t. “I know, right?!” More angry gesturing at the screen. “And whoever did this should damn well know better. This is not a duet, it’s not a smooth floaty song, it sure as heck isn’t a love song--” He caught himself, looked back up vaguely towards the ceiling. “I mean, okay, I kind of maybe get where they’re coming from.”

Ah. There went Felix’s reluctantly rising opinion of the boy. Back down to normal levels. Whew.

“It’s a big dramatic emotion song, you know?” Nino rubbed the back of his neck. “And for most people, big dramatic emotion’s gotta mean, like, romantic. Dude is so clueless,” he muttered. “I’d be worried as heck if it was a romance thing. Like. Dude.” He tapped the screen. “I don’t have to know English to know that ‘no-no no-no no-no no’ bit. It’s a verbal punch. What kind of love song has a bunch of yelling ‘no’ and punching in it?”

“Papillon’s.”

Nino choked on thin air, eyes going wide and landing on Felix like he’d suddenly remembered which twin he was talking to. Another moment, and he visibly bit back a reply. (If Felix had to guess, another robot comment, probably ‘you can make jokes?’, expletives optional.)

Felix set down the folder of papers he’d prepared next to Nino’s laptop, then took a seat on a chair that looked like it had been swiped from a dining set. “Shall we begin, or would you prefer to preach to the choir further?”

“We’re starting, we’re starting,” Nino muttered, taking the folder as his gaze flickered to the computer’s clock.  _ Yes Lahiffe we are five minutes late, that’s five minutes we did not have to spend in each other’s company except you insisted on ranting about obvious disasters. _ “The heck--?”

“Contract,” Felix answered as Nino frowned at the topmost printout. “Never do work without one.” Look at him, offering helpful life advice that Nino should know already. “I cut most of the legalese and discussions of benefits and irrelevant tax withholdings. It should be sufficient to y--good lord  _ read  _ it don’t just sign it!”

“Why?” Nino asked defiantly, adding a little flourish to the last letter of his name. “You’re not gonna do something Adrien would get pissy about.”

Well  _ yes  _ but there were  _ principles  _ here.

Nino set the contract aside, signed the second copy of it, then began shuffling through the rest of the papers.

Favorite songs list (title and band-or-movie, in alphabetical order by source material first), favorite dance roles list (in two sections, one for those Felix had done and one for those Felix had only ever watched others do), mood list (unfortunately short, with most of the words contributed by internet thesaurus, and the rest by describing his computer photo files to Google and seeing if the image search pulled up similar items, then finding descriptive tags)...

Nino flipped the mood list over, frowning, then looked at the back of the other pages, then in the folder again. “Dude. Did you lose the move list?”

“I didn’t make one.”

He turned a flat, disbelieving look on Felix. “Come on. You’re all about doing homework and stuff.” And Felix had done more than Nino had asked. “It was three things and you got, what, like sixty percent?”

“Sixty-seven.” Honestly, Nino, that was third-grade math. Felix steepled his hands before himself. “I’m sure you don’t have any idea what any of the moves are called -- a pirouette does not count, everybody knows that one -- and I’m not about to sit here while you google what a pas de chat looks like.” Not that Nino couldn’t google it outside of their meetings, but why waste their time like that? “For all I know, you’d end up watching Balanchine technique anyway.”

“Hey, I’m not about to mix up ballet and balanchine, come on dude. They don’t even sound alike.”

“And you’ve proven my point.”

“What.”

“Balanchine is an American style. Quite different.” (“ _ Seriously dude that’s it?” _ Nino muttered.) “I can record video of the moves properly, or just demonstrate here.”

“Wait what.”

“You heard me.” But Felix looked around Nino’s room instead of at Nino, because he didn’t want to see what kind of face the other boy would be making after Felix had… basically just offered to dance for him. Which shouldn’t be  _ weird _ , Felix was an advanced student, he danced for people regularly. (It was distinctly weird in a way Felix did not want to think about.) “Maybe your living room, instead,” Felix muttered, eyeing the close confines. “Have some space to actually move…”

“Dude, you want to  _ dance  _ for me?” Nino asked, incredulous and nonplussed.

Felix had to look back, just to give him a bland, unimpressed stare. (Nino was  _ not  _ pretty when he was being a jerk, much to the cringing relief of Felix’s sense of normalcy.) “Ivan and Mylene aren’t?”

He sputtered. “Well  _ yeah  _ but that’s  _ different _ .”

_ Why ever would that be _ , Felix thought, crossing his arms and letting his expression convey that for him.  _ It couldn’t possibly be due to you getting along with them _ .

Nino made a disgusted sound -- Felix couldn’t tell if it was directed at himself or the universe -- then leaned sideways over his desk. “Jerk,” he muttered, digging into his pocket. He pulled out a small smartphone and wiggled it at Felix. “Oh, speaking of like, actually doing this stuff, I need your number.”

What fo-- oh. Right. Akuma attacks. “What, did you forget to ask Adrien?” Felix asked as he got out his own.

“Dude, no,” Nino said, peering at Felix’s screen. “Didn’t finish a thing til this morning, figured I’d ask you since you’re here. There.” 

Felix’s phone buzzed with a text message, not a call. He glanced at the text to find it was a dropbox link. “What’s this?” he asked flatly. Wasn’t the number to reschedule for akuma attacks and emergencies?

“A demo.” Nino tucked the phone away. “Ivan and Mylene and Adrien all know my skills. You’re just going on Adrien’s word, and dude, I don’t gotta point out that your tastes in music are like, seriously far apart. So I asked him what sort of stuff you listen to and put that together. It’s only about a minute long, so just listen to the thing and see if it works. If not,” he shrugged, fake-casual, “it’s early enough no harm no foul.” His eyes flicked towards the folder with its signed contract. “Even with that thing.”

A demo song? Mocked up in, what, four days without prompting?

That was… oddly more professional than Felix was expecting. Especially after the idiot signed a contract without even looking at it. “Yes,” Felix admitted, “there’s a no-fault dissolution cause.”

“Well. Great, then.”

“Quite.”

How did people disengage themselves from interaction without it being awkward? Felix did not know, and continued to not discover the trick as he took his leave.

He listened to the clip that night, between dinner and patrol.

It… actually wasn’t bad. Simplistic, but it had the start of a soaring violin melody, and used a bass guitar for tempo instead of drums, so it didn’t overwhelm or enslave to a beat… Felix could see the sketchy outline of a way to work with this.   


Work with Nino.

Who actually did know what he was doing.

Who would have thought?   
  


-0-0-0   
  


Alya’s PSA went live on Saturday. Naturally, Felix just had to see what Adrien had been doing while he was suffering Nino’s hospitality.

“Hi everyone!” Alya said, waving at the camera. “We’re going to have to talk about doing paperwork and other really boring adult things today,” she scrunched up her face and stuck out her tongue in disgust, “so, sorry about that kids. How about you go have fun while the old people watch this very boring video? Sounds good? Great!” She paused, smiling apologetically, for about ten seconds, then, “Are they gone?” she asked, cupping a hand and affecting a stage whisper. “Good!” Alya winked, and returned to her normal voice and excited demeanor. “So if you saw the after footage for Tuesday’s akuma, Stayup, that’s today’s Public Service Announcement. How to put little kids to bed akuma-free, starring Ladybug!” she cheered.

The camera view turned, showing a slice of slightly child-worn living room, then stopped on Ladybug, smiling brightly and just a bit woodenly. She stood straight and confident, her hands clasped behind her back as the next best or more friendly option to being on her hips in a power pose.   


Next to her, Chat Jour had broken any attempt at power pose in favor of twisting around while holding a little girl of about five on one hip. She’d hitched herself up high and was studiously trying to tie Chat Jour’s hair into a knot. Draped over Chat’s other shoulder, very unsteadily as he tried to disentangle the little girl’s hands from his hair before she actually succeeded in the knot, was part of a second child. All that could be seen was a pair of lace-trimmed jeans and pink socks, one of which had slip-proof rubber flowers on the soles: the second girl had one knee on Chat’s shoulder and was trying to climb down his back.

“No no no, not the baton, we’re filming right now Ella--” Chat hissed, hamming it up for the camera. Also making himself look like the incompetent babysitter.

Wonderful, Felix thought with a sigh. Because they couldn’t possibly show Ladybug being the one out of her depth. Chat Noir was just there for comedic effect and mistakes.

Sure enough, the video continued to play out in that vein. Ella and Etta, Alya’s little sisters, jumped around the living room and pretended to be much younger than they actually were, mock-crying and drinking water from toy bottles.

Ladybug told Etta it was pajama and storytime. Etta grabbed Ladybug’s hand and all but dragged her from the living room.

Chat Noir told Ella it was bedtime. Ella threw a truly epic tantrum that was only spoiled by how much she giggled between yelling “No! Stay up!”

Ladybug, in what was clearly a take done separate from Ella’s very loud fake tantrum, turned the lights down low, sat on the bed next to Etta, now clad in pajamas, and started reading a story.

Out in the living room, Chat flailed helplessly and yelled at Ella to go to bed. The fake tantrum continued, now with added kicking of Chat. Fake kicking, at least, not anywhere near enough to hurt even someone who wasn’t wearing armor, but still.

Ladybug finished one story, and went on to a second, Etta draped bonelessly against her.

Back to the giggly tantrum. Chat hefted Ella over one shoulder, pinned her legs to his chest, and endured being mock-kicked in the stomach and pummeled along his back as he trudged down the hall with her.

Ladybug gently settled Etta down and tucked her in, then stood as Chat appeared in the doorway, Ella silently kicking and hitting.

Chat gave her a pleading look. “Help?”

And the video went through the same routine with Ella, Chat playing attentive and adoring student to Ladybug’s unpracticed technique.

“Did they actually fall asleep?” Alya asked, sotto voce, after Ladybug and Chat left the twins’ room and shut the door behind them.

“I think they did,” Ladybug admitted.

Chat nodded. “It’s a pretty powerful technique. Works on sick people too.”

“Wow. Well. Thanks for coming by and doing this for the Ladyblog today!”

Felix checked the video time as Ladybug demurred with tedious social pleasantries. There were nearly two minutes left. Laser Alya struck again, just a few zillion questions pew pew pew.

He was going to be thinking of her like that repeatedly from now on, wasn’t he. This was all Papillon’s fault.

“It seems like you have a lot of experience with kids,” Alya started off with. “That’s really a very clever technique.”

Chat’s ears flattened back a bit, though he just rubbed the back of his neck sheepishly and looked upwards away from them all. “Ah, well--”

“We can’t answer that,” Ladybug said. “Civilian identities, after all. What if we did spend a lot of time around children? Papillon might start targeting them looking for us.”

Alya’s eyes widened almost imperceptibly. “Wow, yeah, got it. You guys are never ever around kids as civilians.” That wasn’t going to dissuade Papillon. He wasn’t an idiot, as far as Felix could tell. Not that they could tell much: trying to speculate as to his strategies and end goal after getting their Miraculouses had come up blank. “Of course,” Alya continued, “even though you aren’t, fighting them has to be rough. But Stayup didn’t seem to be able to do much damage to you guys. People are wondering why you dropped the Tower on him once you got him to the park where he couldn’t really do anything.”

“Well, part of it’s that we didn’t have much else to keep him in place with,” Ladybut explained, “but really? Stayup was much more dangerous than he looked.”

“The lasers were toxic, you see.” Chat made a rueful face. “It took a few hits to realize what was happening.”

“Also we wanted to get the kid cured and back to his parents quickly,” Ladybug said, which wasn’t going to keep Papillon from noting poison lasers as a tactic. Felix despaired of how every interview risked giving the enemy ideas. “They were terrified.”

And the winner for  _ even worse ideas  _ went to Ladybug. If they ever, ever ran into an akumatized parent looking for a missing child, Felix was going to shred Papillon’s face.

“We also didn’t get a chance to talk about Pavillion.” Alya, wisely changing the subject, gave Chat a dirty look. “ _ Someone _ got us off the scene too fast.” Chat flashed her an unreadable grin. “I’ll link to my post about Pavillion’s akumatization in the description box below. I got some great information from the staff of the Louvre, and it’s kicked off a bit of an internet debate! In case you’re watching and haven’t read the post yet, I highly recommend it, but in short people are talking about returning artifacts to their homelands, the destruction of museums in the Middle East, the value of museum collections, just all sorts of stuff! Really, I can’t recommend that post enough. Have either of you read it? Do you care to weigh in?”

“Wow, you are asking the hard-hitting questions today,” Chat said with a laugh, distracting from how Ladybug suddenly looked like she’d been hit with final exams three weeks early. “I have been reading that discussion a bit,” which was a complete lie because Felix was the one to read the more intellectual debates on the Ladyblog. Adrien usually went for quick checks in transit to the next bit of nonsense on his schedule, looking for pictures of Ladybug and clues about her. “But not very much, there’s not a lot of time for the internet between saving the world.”

“And we really can’t give any sort of authoritative opinions,” Ladybug said. “We’re experts in fighting Papillon, not… I’m not even sure what to call it. Cultural ethics?”

Alya shrugged. “Good enough, people will know what you mean.”

“Cultural ethics, then.” Ladybug considered it for a moment, leaning back in her chair. “What I’m seeing, I think, is that everybody’s side has a point.” She raised one hand, palm up. “Why should something only be available for view in its homeland, so only people who can afford to travel there can see it?” Up came the other hand, weighing the other side of that point. “But why should it be on display somewhere else, owned by people with no right to it?” She shrugged, and let her hands drop, only to point emphasis for each new question. “How do you decide who owns something when the people who made it have been dead for centuries and the land has changed hands half a dozen times since? Who does have the right to it? Can you only make the case for stolen goods? What about things that were paid for, but sold by people who didn’t know what it was worth, or didn’t think it had any value? What do you do with museum collections in a war zone, which is what Pavillion’s problem was part of?” She sighed. “I certainly don’t have any answers.”

“Neither do I,” Chat said. “Though I did see a thread about repatriating things to their homelands, but then sending them on tour regularly, and I have to say, I think that’s a  _ pawful _ idea. Things break in transit easily even when they  _ aren’t  _ ancient and super delicate, that’s why museum collections don’t go on tour very often. Which is sad,” he added, “museums have a lot of cool stuff and it would be neat if they could go around the world for everyone to see in purrson. We really need to invent transporters and inertial dampeners and floating carts like in Star Trek.”

“Which naturally has nothing to do with you getting a hoverboard and surfing down the Seine.”

“Nefur, my Lady,” Chat said piously.

“They have those, you know,” because Alya was a horrible horrible enabler.

“Alas, the Seine is too deep for one to work.”

That looked to be the end of it, so Felix turned off the video while Alya was thanking them again for their time, and went to get changed for practice.

Like Felix’s small, bare room, his closet was all white walls and gray-black wood floors in keeping with the monochrome look of the rest of the house, though lacking the floor-to-ceiling windows of his bedroom. Instead, it had small frosted windows to match the bathroom’s, and full-spectrum lamps in the ceiling and inset at strategic points in the medium-gray shelving. Full color neutrality and daylight were essential for dressing as befit an Agreste, after all. The horror if either of the Agreste boys should be seen wearing colors that were off of perfect coordination by a single shade.

Felix didn’t much care. The closet held his first victory over his father.

The suite did too, to some degree. Unlike Adrien’s room, Felix’s was about the size of an ordinary hotel room, like one of the plebeian ones several floors down from Chloe’s penthouse, though with an attached bath and walk-in closet each the same size as Adrien’s. The three rooms sat all in a row, and had the wall behind Felix’s headboard not been there it would have been obvious that the row was merely a loft over the window side of a much larger space-- not coincidentally, one of the same dimensions as Adrien’s room.

Felix had, when informed that it was time he and Adrien had separate bedrooms for propriety, made his father put in a dance studio. Using arguments that a proper studio -- their father often behaved as if he only had two words in his vocabulary that weren’t fashion jargon, and they were “appropriate” and “proper” -- was single-purpose, it had been separated from the other uses of his bedroom, and come complete with curtains and a properly sprung floor. None of this poured concrete under a climbing wall nonsense their father had pulled on Adrien, or bare windows for light and the perfect #AestheticByGabriel that he’d done to the rest of the house. 

(He had not won on the discussion about warm maple and honey-toned woodwork, but he hadn’t particularly cared about receiving hospital white and bleached ash. He could see his reflection better in peripheral vision that way anyway, since his dance clothes were all dark.)

The floor gave underfoot with a distinct hint of bounciness as Felix stepped onto it from the spiral staircase up to his closet, and the tangible sensation of something properly done and private drained the tension from Felix’s back. He pulled the curtains across the full bank of windows, cutting the sunny glare off the mirrored walls, tossed aside his gray cardigan, and went straight to the barre.

Something about the Black Cat Miraculous had raised Felix’s body temperature about half a degree -- not enough to alarm any nurse, since he and Adrien had run a bit low before, lacking the body fat to insulate them well -- but it had also changed their blood flow to distribute that temperature more evenly in a way that was not human. Adrien had developed a hint of ruddiness to his cheeks and hands, according to his makeup artists, and Felix could feel the change in his muscles.

Hunt-ready, Plagg called it. The ability to go from deep sleep to battle in less than sixty seconds, warmups unnecessary. Which extended to dancing.

Felix began running through pliés anyway. A short warm up would put him into his dance mindset. He liked his dance mind. He didn’t care about being watched, or large crowds, or having personal space in dance mind. There was only movement and precision, the stretch of muscles, the sense of  _ living  _ in his body instead of just having it attached like an awkward costume.

His human body. Human balance. Human flexibility. Human limits to push.

He couldn’t jump over four-story buildings like he did as Chat, but he didn’t want to.

Felix leapt for the stars.

-0-0-0-

_ I should just have Nino work over here _ .

Felix’s rational mind tripped over the idea, his feet went right when he should’ve gone left, and he barely caught himself on the barre before he ran full on into the mirrored wall.

What.  _ What _ .

No. Absolutely not. This was his  _ personal studio _ , he wasn’t about to invite  _ Nino  _ as the first person outside his family and Natalie to enter it--

He’d just thought that he didn’t care about personal space when he danced.

It was logical. His studio had a proper floor, sufficient space, and no furniture or trip hazards like an area rug.

But Nino?

Nino who… who…

Who akumatized over Adrien’s birthday party.

Who’d still been an ass but had tried to think of something Felix would like for his birthday. Hated Felix, but still just stowed him away in a bubble while he thought about a birthday gift.  _ As an akuma _ .

Who’d found a superhero on his roof and just offered a blanket and tea, no questions asked. Who hadn’t bragged about doing something for Chat.

Who hadn’t imposed on Adrien to either pass along the music clip or give away Felix’s phone number.

Nino, whose legitimate presence in the house would  _ really annoy _ Felix’s father.

…

Dammit.

  
  


-0-0-0-

  
  


Felix was practicing  [fouettes](https://youtu.be/Fo250jmBl6I) after a light lunch the next day when the intercom to the studio crackled.

“ _ Felix _ ,” Natalie said. “ _ Your guest is here _ .”

He let his leg fall and stepped over to the door. A large water bottle sat on the floor next to it, under the intercom’s speaker, and he bent to scoop it up as he pressed the reply button. “My contractor, Natalie.” Certainly not a guest. A guest would require informing his father of an unauthorized, non-professional visitor, and Nino was already barely tolerated on the premises. “Please see him to the foyer.”

He took a drink as she said, “ _ Felix _ …”

Sigh. “The foyer, Natalie,” he repeated more sternly, wishing he didn’t have to sound like his father to convince her to go along sometimes. Adrien at least just needed to sparkle and look like sunshine and sad kittens, so in short just be himself. 

Felix pulled his gray cardigan on to conserve the illusion of needing it to stay warmed up, and headed for the front hall of the house.

Nino looked very small and out-of-place there by the front door, shoulders hunched under a large, black, rectangular padded bag, the rest of him all bright colors and casual loose clothing that didn’t fit the hall’s #AestheticByGabriel or his current badly-unnerved posture. Natalie, hovering over him watchfully like a distinctly unimpressed security guard, suited the look better, even with the vibrant ombre streak in her hair.

“Really, Natalie, he’s under contract. Is that your keyboard?” he asked Nino. Nino bit his lip and nodded. “Come on back, then,” he said, turning away with a slight beckoning gesture. To Natalie, he said, “I have it from here,” dismissing her.

He heard more than saw Nino following, then Nino fell into step with him, knuckles white where he had a deathgrip on the straps of his bag. “This place is still terrifying,” Nino said, half whispered. “Dude. Are you sure Natalie’s not the robot?”

“What did I tell you about robot jokes?” But he didn’t bother letting Nino answer. “I do wish you’d stop ascribing my father skills he doesn’t have. He can barely operate the TV.” Mostly because he never watched it, but programming anything electronic, including a robot, really was beyond Gabriel’s skillset. He even had an on-site secretary to hold the tablet and work the Skype on his end when he needed to make video calls. “Here,” Felix finished, pushing open the door to the studio.

“...  _ Dude _ ,” Nino breathed.

“There’s outlets behind the curtains, if you need them,” Felix said, gesturing across the room. And, extending reciprocal hospitality to Nino, he’d brought in one of the dining room chairs and set it near one of the outlets.

The studio was a couple of degrees warmer than the rest of the house. Felix stripped out of and tossed his sweater back over the barre, and heard Nino stumble. “Watch your step, a dance floor’s smoother than you think.”

“... Right.” When Felix glanced back, Nino looked much more relaxed, straight-shouldered and thumbing his hat brim up out of his eyes as he looked towards the loft. “You want me to set up under the lower bit here or what?”

“If you could take the corner down left,” Felix blinked when Nino headed for the correct corner without prompting, “we usually have a piano there during class.”

“So you’re used to that spot being full, got it.” Nino leaned his bag carefully against the wall near the windows -- one of the few panels that was wood rather than mirror -- and pulled the chair over. Then he unzipped the bag, pulled out a keyboard stand, and began setting up. “Okay, so, you gave me a lot to work with, dude. Real surprise actually. But yeah. There’s a lot of, like, night and snow and astronomy stuff in your photos thing, did you know that?” Felix gave him a withering look. “Of course you did,” Nino muttered, dropping a coil of thick wiring by his feet. “Right. Anyway. I’m thinking, like,  [glass harmonica](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEKlRUvk9zc) , get that cold bell sound without the sharp tap start, you know? Some flute, do keyboard for the tempo percussive underlayer. Rock a bottle for wind effects. Maybe take this thing from kabuki, they have a  [ sound effect for snow ](https://youtu.be/zDAPa5PeTho?t=4m17s) . But keep it cold and clear and smooth for the most part.”

Felix could not help being surprised again. He crossed his arms, tilting his head. “Do you have a story to go along with that, or do I get to decide?”

Nino shoved a plug into place with a sharp click, but shrugged. “I dunno. Like. Arctic mountain snow spirit watching the northern lights or something? It’s gonna be damn hard to get winter without making it Christmas.” He made a face and started flicking switches on the keyboard. “Once people think a thing is Christmas, there’s no saving it, it’s stuck being overplayed in December and never seen the rest of the year.”

Unfortunately true.

“So anyway, yeah. That’s my thoughts.” Nino plopped a notebook and pencil on top of the keyboard, then rested his head on one hand and looked over at Felix. “But it’s your dance, dude.”

How nice of Nino to acknowledge that.   


Felix paced to the barre nearest them, which marked an imaginary wing stage left, and eyed the extent of the studio. Then he crossed briskly to the other barre and turned to do it again, crossing one arm over himself and pressing his other hand pensively against his mouth. He hadn’t quite decided yet-- no, no he was not going to start the song by rushing at Nino. Definitely stage left.

“I would like to make an entrance from the wings,” Felix murmured just above his knuckle, pacing back towards Nino. If he kept his chin up and eyes on the floor where the keyboard stood it would hide that he wasn’t meeting Nino’s eyes. “It helps catch the audience’s attention,” he explained, to distract further. “So perhaps start with a wind element.”

He could see Nino nodding at the upper edge of his vision, jotting that down. “Blow you onstage, got it.”

Yes, blow him on-- Felix made it another step before tripping.

Nino paused, glancing confusedly at him. Then, “ _ Not like that! _ ” he yelped, jerking straight upright with his face flashing a deep, dark red.

_ Definitely  _ not like that.  _ Never  _ like that. (Felix’s face  _ burned _ , all the way to the back of his neck and the tips of his ears, oh  _ god  _ never like that,  _ why did people have to invent euphemisms why _ .) “I’ll.” He had composure, he lived composure, he’d overheard worse at some of the more recent Agreste events. “I’ll take that in the spirit it was meant.”

“Right okay thanks please can we move on,” Nino moaned into his hands.

Moving on. “Well. Then.”  _ Moving. On. _ “I was thinking, windiness in film tends to be shown in a certain circular manner.” Felix took a step back, taking  [second position](https://youtu.be/1fSa3ESmA1s) for lack of decision on where his footing was going to be after his entrance. “I thought I could use that, trace the loop in the air.”

If he entered from stage left, back to the audience would put his right hand low; front to the audience would have his left low. He put his back to the audience, and twisted counterclockwise, lifting his right hand to just above his head as it passed upstage of him, then dropping it back down to shoulder height and reached back up-- awkward. Hm. He tried the other way, but that was even worse: most of the movement happened behind his body.

“Okay, yeah, I see where you’re going with that.” Nino’s pencil scratched over his paper. “Woosh in, pause for the still-winter-night thing, wind picks up again. Brings a note with it… low glass?” he asked himself.

Glass… winter... “A few rond de jambes,” Felix murmured, tracing the large half-circle of one across the floor with his toe.

“No idea what that means, dude.”

“Then pay attention.” Felix waited til Nino looked up, then did a few more, demonstrating the step with each foot, then how they could start from the front or back, then turning to show how it looked from different sides.

“Huh,” Nino said. “Can you move around while doing that?” He gestured across the floor, away from him and past Felix, with one finger. “Kind of get an ice skate look?”

“Yes, of course.” It had been exactly what he was thinking.

“Lemme pick a note, then I’ll try breaking up a basic chord progression off it and see how that works.”

Whatever that meant. “Wind noise in, beat of silence, wind brings a low note--”

Nino flapped a hand at Felix to cut him off, attention on the keyboard. “Patience, dude,” he said over a deep, shimmering minor chord in synthesized glass. “Figure out your loopy hand thing while I do this.”

_ Loopy hand thing.  _ At least Felix wasn’t paying Nino for his eloquence. Good lord.

Felix turned away and twisted slowly, tracing out the  _ loopy hand thing. _ The first half up was easy, the tricky part was finding where to do the retrograde down-angled part so it remained visible to the audience and looked natural circling his head. And his footing, of course-- something about the concept wanted him on demi-pointe, which he might have to change for the ice-skate rond de jambes… those, if he did a half-turn during the loopy hand thing thank you Nino, he’d be facing Nino to start them. The line of the wind’s direction would push him backwards from that, stage right, travel upstage a bit perhaps…

Nino’s low note shimmered out alone, Felix looped for it, and then one step higher note rond de jambe, two step higher note rond de jambe, three step higher note and he was  [well into stage right](https://youtu.be/N29pOKKoT6A?t=237) and curving upstage.

How to get back to center? He’d be all over the stage, hopefully, but he definitely needed to keep his presence focused at the center, keep returning to it.

Felix considered the space again. Center, loop, rond rond rond, he’d straightened out of the sequence automatically… attitude, perhaps? Glance back over his shoulder, give a sense of distance from the audience, of a much larger space than what could be seen on stage-- but no, attitude would be too expansive, he’d want something--

Nino’s phone, buried in his keyboard bag, went off with an  [ominously chirpy bit of music](https://youtu.be/QzcvRDWgRIE).  Before Felix could do more than frown about the disrespect of having left it on in the first place, Nino groaned. “Oh great,” he said. “Akuma attack.”

Oh. Felix strode quickly over as Nino worked his phone, finding the Ladyblog on the small screen and Alya livestreaming already. The akuma looked to be a blue-themed Medusa bursting fire hydrants and trapping people in water columns.

“Alya, get out of there,” Nino hissed, even though Alya for once had the good sense to be hiding. It looked like she’d found a low wall to hide behind, one under some evergreen bushes going by the shape of the shadows at the bottom of the screen.

Ladybug on scene, check, as Alya’s fast-panning camera work found the red-clad superhero running past on the rooftops. Chat… six water columns broke at once in a sweep of silver baton, dumping soaked, coughing people onto the pavement. Chat on scene, check, and clearly Adrien would be the more useful one today. There’d be no need for Felix to extract himself from observation… and Felix could not dance like this, not while Adrien was out there risking his neck. They’d get no more work done til after the akuma was put down. He stepped over to the intercom.

“Natalie. There’s an akuma attack in progress,” he informed the device. “Please see to it that the Ladyblog is on in the kitchen.”

“ _ Of course, Felix _ .”

“Thank you.” He turned it back off and looked at Nino. He couldn’t just leave Nino sitting in the studio alone, that would be rude. Also, if Nino got curious or restless and started snooping, Felix’s room was just up the stairs and there was no lock on the trapdoor. There’d never been a need for one. “Well?” He asked, getting Nino’s attention as he opened the door and beckoned sharply. “Come on, then.”

“What? Where?” Nino asked as he stood, phone in a white-knuckled hand. “Did you guys put in an akuma shelter or something?”

“No.”

The hallway was cool and silent, save for the tinny sounds of the battle playing on low on Nino’s phone. Felix’s fists clenched at his sides, stomach tight -- he’d forgotten his cardigan in his haste, he realized crossing through the front hall -- and then the next hallway had warmer light streaming from a door at the end of it to the left, and the same sounds of the fight playing half a second off-kilter to Nino’s stream.

The sound cut off with a shriek and a gasp, and the screen in the kitchen showed nothing but white foam when Felix entered it briskly.

“Alya!” Nino grabbed Felix’s sleeve. “Dude, she just got caught!”

Felix pulled free and pushed Nino down onto one of the rarely-used barstools at the counter. “Sit.” He pointed at the large flatscreen set into the backsplash above the dishwasher. “Watch.” He plucked the phone from Nino’s unresisting grip and turned it off. “Save your battery.”

“Don’t you  _ care _ ?!”

Alya got caught because she wouldn’t run away like a sensible person with the option to do so. Adrien was out there fighting on purpose, and Felix didn’t know if Plagg could prevent drowning for a fight on land. “Yes,” he said curtly, unwilling to show any more than that, and went to wash his hands in the small sink in the butler’s pantry before gathering ingredients.

Flour, sugar… butter, eggs, stored in a large fridge here because the sleek undersized one in the kitchen proper was another victim of #AestheticByGabriel. It only ever held perfectly-arranged displays of seasonal produce and gifts received from business contacts, never anything so plebeian as  _ butter _ .

Nino glared narrowly at Felix when he emerged from the butler’s pantry, arms loaded with baking supplies, to find the screen had cleared again and Alya’s phone -- and, presumably, Alya herself -- was now bouncing over rooftops with the akuma raging in hot pursuit at the head of a tsunami. “What are you doing?”

“Panicking,” Felix said flatly. He dropped the armload on the counter, catching the baking powder as it tried to roll away. “Don’t judge.”

“Ooooookay,” Nino said, reeling back and holding his hands up, “not judging.”

He was, Felix could hear it in his voice, but as long as Nino didn’t say anything Felix wouldn’t either.

The pears in the fancy fridge would be most difficult to rearrange prettily if Felix took some. Pear pie it was. He left one, a small one with an off-kilter stem marring its near-perfect symmetry, and took the rest.

“Do you eat pears?” he asked as he got out a cutting board and selected a knife, and tried to ignore the screen showing Chat surfing down the Seine on a road sign ten meters above one of the [Périph’](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boulevard_P%C3%A9riph%C3%A9rique) bridges, ears and tail bolt upright and hair frizzed in hydrophobic horror.

“... Yeah, sometimes?”

“You can have a slice.”  _ One _ , because it was good manners as his mother had taught. “The rest is for Adrien.”

“... Thanks, I guess.” Nino’s gaze flicked back to the screen. “I’m kinda not hungry right now.”

Well neither was Felix, but this wasn’t for either of them, now was it.

After a few minutes in tense silence, Felix mixing up a pie crust and Nino watching the chaos continue out in the city, Nino said, “Bet you ten euros it was Chloe.”

“I’ll give you a hundred if it wasn’t.”   
  


-0-0-0-   
  


Felix accepted his winnings graciously over pie once Adrien got home.

-0-0-0   
  


“Kid, come on,” Plagg whined, all four sets of claws dug into Adrien’s couch. “I’m  _ tired _ . I got wet and cold today-- we fought the Hydrator! Look at me!” And he tried to look forlorn and winsome up at Felix.

It did not work. “You’ve had three wheels of cheese and a nap, you’re immune to both cold and water, and I know for a fact that the magic removes every bit of water and grime in de-transforming anyway,” Felix told him, unimpressed. “Get your claws out of the couch, we have patrol.”

Plagg sunk into the cushions even more deeply. “Nooooooo. We have sleep! Like your very sensible brother is doing right now!”

Oh, that was rich, calling  _ Adrien  _ the sensible one. He’d crashed into bed just a few minutes after eight --  _ eight _ , as if he was five years old! when usually they couldn’t fall asleep til nearly midnight! -- because  _ sensible  _ people didn’t have to ride road signs down tsunamis through Paris and carry half-grown paparazzi across five kilometers of rooftops. “If you cause my brother problems because you rip the furniture getting summoned into the ring…” Felix hissed.

They stared each other down for a long moment, while that idea hung heavy in the air between them. Then, Plagg slowly released his claws from the couch, leaving just a set of tiny holes that hopefully Natalie wouldn’t notice.

“Thank you. Plagg, claws out.”

The power of the Miraculous Ladybug was that Paris looked none the worse for wear after the day’s nonsense. The crowds were perhaps a bit louder, people gossiping shakily about the Hydrator -- which wasn’t even the right mythos, some little part of Felix’s mind grumbled -- and the air maybe smelled a tiny bit of petrichor, like it had rained today instead of it being sunny and freezing, but otherwise akuma were just… normal now, as stressful as a bad traffic accident but not paralyzingly terrifying anymore.

They were getting used to the attacks.

Chat added that to the worries always sitting in the back of his mind, and headed east. Hydrator had been on the west side of the city, so it was sort of like it’d been patrolled there already today. So said Ladybug, and it was as good an argument as any.

The plaintive call of a violin near the Canal St. Martin drew Chat Nuit in. The player was in a small park by the canal, her violin echoing down several streets full of tiny cafes and restaurants, and into the trees and over the narrow bridges wound with dazzling fairy lights. She was actually good, if a bit sappy for his tastes, and Chat stopped in one of the largest trees to listen. It didn’t have a good sitting branch -- it had been pruned to more of a vase shape, letting breezes and dappled sunlight through to keep the street feeling pleasant on hot days -- but his feet fit nicely into the fork, and he could lean against the largest branch and watch the lights sparkle on the river.

He should come back here again sometime, some evening when he had a few moments to spare and money to drop in her violin case. This was pretty nice for being utterly freezing.

“Chat Noir!”

Chat jolted and nearly fell out of the tree. All right, pretty nice except for  _ random Nino Lahiffes  _ popping up out of the woodwork, beaming at him with eyes lit up. His expression didn’t close off, so Chat was hopefully managing a neutral-maybe-startled face instead of showing his actual thoughts. (Could he not go a few hours without running into the guy?)

Nino was standing on tiptoe, peering as closely at Chat as he could from a good two meters down. “Wow, I thought so,” he said. “That hair, and the missing baton, and you don’t look anywhere  _ near  _ bushed enough… you aren’t the same Chat who fought today, are you?”

Chat bolted.

“ _ Hey wait come back _ \--!”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warning in end notes.

Felix spent the rest of the night worrying and wishing he could strangle Plagg (after pointedly putting one of the wheels of his Camembert in the freezer). There was  _ supposed _ to be a magical glamour hiding their identities. That was why using a tiny eye mask for disguise even  _ worked _ , but somehow--

( _ Drawing your weird hair and stuff _ , Adrien had said. Because the most noticeable difference between their transformations was Adrien’s leather ears to Felix’s ridiculous black hair gel.

_ No baton today, dude? _ Nino had asked, just a couple of days before that, with Pavillion. Which was another major difference, that Felix’s only weapon was his long, steel-sharp claws.)

\-- somehow, Nino knew.   


_ That hair, and the missing baton, and you aren’t nearly bushed enough. _

Just how long had Nino been suspecting there were two Chats?

What was he going to do with that knowledge?

-0-0-0-   
  


Nothing, it seemed. At least, nothing that involved telling Adrien, Alya, the internet, and the world, in approximately that order.

_ Stalking _ Chat Nuit, on the other hand...

Tuesday night, Chat ran his patrol south to the international university next to Montsouris Park. Midterms were coming up and early papers were due, after all. He and Ladybug weren’t sure if a long-term stress breakdown would akumatize the way a sudden temper flare would, but they’d decided it’d best to keep an eye on things just in case.

Nothing seemed amiss -- Tuesdays were fairly quiet at the college, in the slump between Monday hangovers and Thursday panic homework -- so he headed out, cutting across the corner of the slush-streaked park. The road here was narrow, with light provided more from houses and car headlights than the streetlights, and next to a gated-off parking alley, a heavily pregnant woman was trying to keep a grip on a squirming toddler without dropping either her groceries or a large diaper bag.

Chat dropped to the street, well in view and out of reach so he wouldn’t scare the poor woman, and stepped up to catch the groceries just as they lost the fight with gravity.

“If I may…?” he asked, taking the diaper bag from the frazzled woman as well. “Where are we off to?”

She looked almost grateful enough to cry. Please no. “Just the bus stop,” she answered in breathy relief, the toddler squirming and whining in her grip. The stop was scarcely fifty meters away, but Chat gamely carried her bags there, then set them on the bench and rearranged the diaper bag so it could hold some of the groceries inside as well. It would do for long enough to get her home, hopefully.

The bus arrived as Chat was tying the plastic grocery bag (now empty enough to knot closed so nothing would fall out) to the diaper bag’s strap by its handles. He extended the strap as far as it would go, settled it over the woman’s head and shoulder to cross her body, and helped her up onto the bus.

“Thank you, Chat Noir,” she said, then winced when the toddler grabbed her hair.

_ Magic trust don’t fail me now _ , he thought, and booped the toddler’s tiny nose with the back of his knuckle.

It worked: the toddler let go and blinked, eyes crossing to focus on his finger. “Behave for your mother, now,” he said, and waved bye-bye as the doors closed.

Whew.

He was never going to do that to some poor woman. Make her handle a baby and errands and all of her own work by herself. His job would not be more important than that.

He turned to head back for the rooftops and nearly crashed into Nino Lahiffe.

“Hey, Chat Noir!” Nino said cheerfully. Then, with a bit of better-hidden concern, peering up at Chat, “Did I scare you, dude?”

Chat stifled a hiss. “ _ No _ ,” he lied, slowly peeling his claws, one by one, out of the bus shelter’s ceiling. Ugh, steel. Almost as bad as chalkboard for the sensation, though at least it didn’t sound like slate. “What do you want?”

“Just saw you helping out when I got off the bus.” Nino beamed. “You’re better with kids than on the video,” he added, which was a far better sense of discretion than Alya had, since he’d actually noticed and cared that they were in public and probably being recorded. Alya would’ve just started firing off questions about him being a second Chat.

“... Acting,” Chat said, twisting to get his last claw free and wincing at the pockmarks left behind. At least the shelter wouldn’t be too much worse against bad weather than it already was, being half-open to the elements and uninsulated. “Ladybug’s not so great at doing intentional comic relief.” All true. Just… skipping over the detail that it hadn’t been Felix in the video. “And the Chat suit has better armor,”  _ shit _ Papillon was going to hear that, “not that the Ladyblogger’s little actress was trying to do damage. We might’ve found out if Ladybug was ticklish, I guess.” Not helping.

Nino’s look brightened a little, curiosity sharpening. “Yeah? Are you ticklish, then?”

What kind of question was that? “Better armor,” Chat repeated, tapping one lightly-pauldroned shoulder with his claw. “I didn’t get to find out.” Aaaaand he was leaving before Nino started trying to sneak more information out of him. “Got to go.” He flicked a mock salute at Nino the way Chat Jour would, then leapt onto the bus shelter’s roof, over the heads of the crowd to catch the sill of a second-story window, and he ran up the building and fled.   
  


-0-0-0

On Wednesday, Chat Nuit left before sunset, and lay half-hidden on a low roof in Montmartre Village to watch the stars come out over the rooftops as the sky faded from indigo to black in the east. Truthfully, they’d be easier to see from one of the many higher buildings around, but he was watching mostly for color, and this particular roof had two heat exhausts venting onto it. One was from a greenhouse on the other side of the roof peak, and carried with it the scent of oranges and herbs.

“Hey! Chat Noir!”

Chat snapped upright, staring down at the street far too close below. Again?  _ Again? _

Nino waved, grinning, then dug a tiny object out of a bag hanging off his arm. He hurled it at Chat, who caught it more by panic-stricken reflexes than intent.

It was a pear-flavored lollipop.

Chat stared at it, then down at Nino, and Nino saluted him with a lavender one. “Thanks for the hard work!” He called up. Then he winked and headed into the building next door.

There were windows in that building facing this roof.

… Now would be a great time to find out if there were better heating vents somewhere else.

-0-0-0-   
  
  


Later that night, while Adrien was distracted watching Ladybug videos and sighing like some lovelorn Disney prince, Felix plucked Plagg out of the air and ducked into the bathroom.

“Plagg, the glamour is  _ not working _ .  _ Look _ at this.” Felix aimed Nino’s lollipop at the kwami’s nose, making damn sure he could see the flavor label. “I made a pear pie on Sunday, and he’s seeing through the magic clearly enough to know there’s two of us, and then he gives me this!”

Plagg had the audacity to snicker. “Kid.” He smirked up at Felix, whiskers twitching with amusement. “It’s not him. It’s you.”

“What.”

“Well, me.” Plagg shrugged lazily, tail curling up towards his stomach. “Weird luck is my thing, remember? He just grabbed whatever and it happened to be the one that would make you flip out.”

“ _ Plagg _ .”

“Kwami’s honor.” Plagg raised his paw. “The kid’s clueless.”   
  


-0-0-0

Thursday, Chat wasn’t even in Paris proper. He thought he’d heard yelling from the far side of the Periph’, and he had, but it’d just been a few older teens getting caught spraying graffiti around a tennis court. He stayed long enough to be sure none of them akumatized, then headed back. There was a vacant, sandy lot he had to land in to get back over the Periph’ and into the 19th arrondissement, since he had no handy rooftops or streetlamps (or a baton,  _ Plagg _ ) to pass overhead with.

Somehow he was not even surprised to hear the shout from behind him. “Chat Noir!”

Why was Nino even  _ here _ ? Montmartre had been one thing, near the city core where Nino lived, but here, and at the bus stop two nights ago… both places were at the fringes of the city, practically on top of the freeway. What was Nino doing wandering all over Paris like this?

Chat sighed, trying not to let his shoulders hunch up, then turned. His tail swept warily around his hips, because the damn thing had a mind of its own, and he crossed his arms to glare at Nino.

Nino was carrying a paper tray of savory-spicy smelling dumplings in a gently steaming black sauce in one hand, and a stack of napkins and a plastic fork in the other, and was wearing the same black-and-green knitted hat from the night with Stayup. He also had on a coat which Chat had never seen before, made of blindingly blue wool with a riot of badges sewn onto it. From the placement of the badges, clustered like varicolored wave foam splashing over his shoulders and up the cuffs and left hem, Marinette had probably done the sewing. She’d almost managed to mitigate the strength of the coat’s color, as well as preventing the badges from looking like either a Boy Scout or an aspiring punk.

Then Chat actually focused on the badges themselves, and realized why he’d never seen Nino wearing the coat to school. Most of them were for bands of some stripe, and that was too close to advertising to conform to dress code.

Whatever. “How do you keep on finding me?” Chat snapped.

“Me?” Nino blinked, visibly taken aback. “I dunno, dude, I’m not actually looking.” He shifted, tipping his head a bit and smiling wryly. “I mean, I would be if I had a clue how to look besides, like, running towards the akuma and hoping not to get squished.” Thank you for that visual, Nino, Chat had been  _ trying to forget _ how close he’d been to some people’s injuries. “Not, like, to ask you identity stuff!” he added hastily, in a way that he probably would’ve been making a stop motion with his hands if they weren’t full. “Just like, to ask if you only ever do night patrol and if you know why nobody’s clued in and stuff!”

“Yes. Magic,” Chat answered succinctly, in order. Did Nino really think he’d believe questions that dumb were true? “Now what’s the real reason?”

Nino’s brow furrowed. “No, seriously. I’m not doing it on purpose. It’s just weird luck, I guess.”

. . . 

Chat was going to  _ kill _ Plagg. He slowly dropped his face into his hand, because this was not only Felix’s luck but  _ exactly _ Plagg’s sense of humor.

“Dude, you, ah… look like you’ve figured something really stupid out?”

Chat glanced back up, between two fingers because it really was that stupid. “It’s not you. It’s me,” he said sardonically, echoing Plagg but also far too many of Adrien’s movies. “This is --” _ Plagg’s _ “-- the magic’s sense of humor at work.”

Nino’s eyebrows vanished under his hat. “The magic… the Miraculous thingie? It’s got a sense of humor?”

Dammit. “Something like that.” Chat let his hand fall. “Apparently random encounters with the one guy who’s noticed me are hilarious.” Hilarious, right. Suitable punishment, more like. Plagg must’ve gotten the cheese that Felix had frozen. “Fine, right, you keep finding me. Joke’s over. Go home.”

“Aw, come on, Mystery Cat--”

“Mystery Cat?” Chat echoed incredulously under his breath.

“Take a break! You’ve been, like, stealth saving the day for months -- thanks for the fire rescue by the way, dude --”  _ I should’ve dropped you on the pavement _ , Chat thought. Then,  _ from maybe half a meter up, sprained ankle, completely harmless accident. Distract you from my stupid hair and costume _ . “-- stick around, have a snack or something.” He wiggled the tray of rapidly-cooling dumplings.

Chat was not hungry enough to eat random street food. Even if it did smell spicy and delicious.

“... Wait, can you have pork? Don’t answer that.” Nino frowned at his dish. “There’s like, chili peppers and honey and wheat and cabbage, uh shoot I don’t know all the ingredients--”

“I don’t have any food restrictions.” Except that would’ve been a great excuse. Cover, distract! “Don’t you have school?” Chat asked. “Go home, go to bed!”

“Don’t  _ you  _ have school?” Nino countered, and Chat’s entire thought process ground to a screeching halt.

Nino picked out a dumpling, swirled it through the sauce in the bottom of the tray, and took a bite.

“... No,” Chat managed to say. “What makes you think that?” Other than Ladybug’s stupid textbook incident, where she hadn’t thought to just  _ tell  _ Alya she’d knocked it out of Marinette’s window in passing by, as anyone paying attention to the background of the video would’ve realized if they’d also known the building.

Nino finished his dumpling and licked his thumb clean of sauce. “You’re a terrible liar, dude,” he said. “Also, you’re too interesting to be some old creep.”

Chat stared.

After another half a dumpling, Nino blinked. “What? You don’t have that whole… grown-up vibe, you know what I mean?” No, Chat had no clue. If anything, he’d been told repeatedly -- by Nino himself, even -- that he acted too old for his age. “You’re a whole lot more Robin than Batman,” Nino finished, which made even less sense.

So Chat told him so, and, “I could be twenty or something.”

Nino paused. Considered that. “Well, yeah,” he said slowly. “I guess you are kind of…” Another moment of thought. “I mean, I never see you playing around on patrol like the other Chat, but you don’t…” He waved a dumpling that had to be half ice cold by now. “You’ve been running away from me instead of being all, like, ‘shoo, go home kid’ til now.”

That needed a moment to untangle, but something about the reasoning… oh. Oh. “I’m not being indulgent or dismissive of you in the same way an adult would, you mean.”

“Yeah, that!” Nino beamed.

“So you agree we both have school to get up early for,” Chat finished, and Nino’s face fell. Hah. “Good night.” Chat darted across the vacant lot and up a streetlight, and -- as Nino shouted “Aw, hey, come on!” -- flashed back a salute and a smirk before leaping across the Periph’ and away.

Bye, Nino. Got you with your own logic. Which…

… which…

… had almost started being amusing, that last moment there.

_ Why  _ did Felix have to have these moments of terrible, terrible taste?   
  
  


-0-0-0

“Ah, no no no! Hold!” Mme. Balon clapped her hands, stopping the music and sharply shooing the class back upstage to the barre. “Felix, where is your attention today?”

Felix winced. Madame never took ‘sorry’ as an answer: she expected more than rote apologies. “Not… here, Madame Balon,” Felix admitted, eyes on the floor.

His attention had been on the musical instruments down stage left, today. This particular piece of music had a Hollywood-western theme (he’d noticed that before, obviously), and the guitar that anchored the entire thing wasn’t a normal one at all (he’d also noticed that). What he hadn’t cared to pay attention to before was… well, it wasn’t an electronic keyboard set to guitar instead of piano sounds. The thing looked like someone had simply cut off the neck of a guitar, strings intact, added some plastic for stability, and put it on a stand like it was a keyboard.

Nino would’ve been fascinated to play with it...

“ _ Felix! _ Your  _ attention _ .” Mme. Balon snapped her fingers sharply before his face. Felix glanced up from sheer reflex, just in time to see the dark, gleaming shadows of something snakey winding up outside the window.

“Madame, duck!” he yelped, tackling her to the floor as the windows exploded in a shower of glass and ringing metal. Glass rained in his hair -- he hoped it was tempered, but his luck probably was not that good -- as chains whipped through the space over his head. Everything was screaming, panic, and people’s shadows falling over him as one by one his classmates were hauled slowly through the window by manacles around their wrists.

The chains hadn’t scoured the ground. Only Felix and Mme. Balon were left in the ringing silence. He sat up carefully, glass falling from his hair in glittery nuggets. (Tempered glass. Thank god for public construction regulations.) “Madame Balon?” he asked as the dance teacher pushed herself up as well, wincing as she gingerly brushed more glass out of her gray-streaked bangs. “I’m going to take shelter in the--” not the locker room, it had transom windows for light “-- toilet. You should find someplace without windows as well.”

“Felix,” she gasped, reaching for him as he slid free and ran. “The glass--!”

Felix had walked over gravel wearing just socks once, when he was very small. This was rather the same experience, but at least the tempered glass was scattered only sporadically in the hallway, mostly in front of classroom doors, and Felix only needed to get out of Mme. Balon’s sight.

Had Adrien heard the commotion yet?

“Plagg, claws out!” and Felix felt the very faintest squeeze of the ring pulling Plagg to it. So that would be a no: Felix had called for the transformation first. Plagg was going to be unbearably smug again later, and they’d recreate the great frozen cheese fiasco, and Plagg would probably this time drop Felix literally on Nino’s  _ head-- _

Plagg came sailing through the broken window in a streak of green-tinged black, and hit the ring with a watery-feeling thud.

Claws, weird hair-ears, and inhuman balance restored, Chat Nuit swung himself out the window and climbed straight up the wall to the roof.

The chains, Chat Nuit instantly saw, would be of absolutely no use in tracking the akuma. They were dragging people every which way with no rhyme or reason, knocking some into street signs, and hauling others slowly up (or down) buildings with no regard for gravity. Fortunately, the people being dragged, struggling, down from high windows were moving at the same pace as everybody else: slowly, instead of simply being dropped several stories onto the roads.

Traffic was at a standstill. Most of the drivers had managed to hit the brakes or put their cars into park, but they all had broken windows, and there were chains trying to pull them out of their seats without benefit of undoing the seat belts. The people in the cars couldn’t reach to undo their seat belts, either: the chains, which Chat hadn’t seen from the floor of the classroom, had grabbed onto people with long heavy manacles of pitted iron stretching from elbow to wrist, and with the pulling no one could get enough slack to hit the buckles.

Ladybug landed beside Chat on the dance school’s roof. “She’s on the Pantheon!” she said, and bounced into her next swoop and away.

Pantheon. All right, then.

Chat followed.

There was indeed a small, dark figure on the very top of the Pantheon’s domed roof, balancing delicately on the horizontal of its cross. A woman wearing a flowing black dress with a tattered hem, thick chains crowning her lank hair and weighing down pale hands and polka-dotted arms--

No.

No, those didn’t look like fabric. More like spots. Did she have a leopard-inspired ability somewhere? Super speed, perhaps? (That would be… urgh. Super speed was a pain to deal with, especially if you got pinned down, like the chains would probably do.)

The akuma turned, and her face was a gleaming, spiked steel mask from nose to collar, melded with the usual akuma black-domino over her eyes. She raised her iron-ringed hands and silently beckoned at them with one, then tapped the upraised palm of the other.

“Nope!” Ladybug replied, since the demand was always the same and the gesturing easy to interpret.

And here came the chains, rattling and ringing and  _ eeeep much faster than Chat expected. _ He dived off the roof, rolled across a flat one, bounced over its retaining wall, and caught himself by one set of claws digging into the stonework and his boot landing on someone’s head.

“Ow!”

“Sorry!” Chat said, and kicked off the wall. Perfect backflip, he was going to stick the landing on someone’s abandoned motor-scooter (oh that was going to hurt).

Ooooooor he could get grabbed by a pair of manacles and hang uselessly a meter up in the air with his shoulders screaming at the sudden stop.

He kicked and twisted, searching the upper chains and skyline for Ladybug (dammit, Jour was so much better at keeping track of her in a fight!), but only saw the akuma walking delicately towards him along a gently-sloping arc of chain from the Pantheon roof.

_ That’s it. That’s it, keep coming, keep your focus on me while Ladybug -- wherever she is -- sneaks around to take aim at _ … whatever the akumatized object was.

Nothing looked out of place on the akuma from this angle. Maybe the mask? It was steel-silver to the rest of the akuma’s unrelieved black-on-black and iron, but it still fit the look. Whatever the look was supposed to be. Except for those weird blue-ish spotted arms.

Violet light flared over the akuma’s face, the hollow shape of what Alya and the media had taken to calling the Mark of Papillon, but the akuma didn’t respond to whatever he was saying. She just nodded, then leaned forward -- carefully out of touching range, so no Cataclysm -- to peer at the manacles.

Chat instinctively followed her gaze, only to find words scored deeply into each one.

_ Property of Papillon. _

Chat could not breathe for one interminable second. Property of…  _ Property _ of--?!  _ How dare they _ .

He screamed, an inhuman yowl tearing out of his throat and ending in a barely-intelligible “ _ Cataclysm! _ ” A jolt of pain tore through his wrist as he twisted it too far, but he managed to get the very tip of his pinky finger on his left manacle.

The manacles exploded in a burst of powdery rust. The iron chains did too, every one that had been touching his own and was connected to someone safely on solid ground… except the akuma. She got dumped onto the road in a disheveled, hair-and-chain-entangled heap of silent rage next to Chat.

Time to retreat and regroup. (And recharge.)

Chat fled.

_ Of course an akuma would have to attack while I was in dancewear and didn’t have any cheese on me! _ Or his phone to google for a cheese shop, or a basic grocery. And since all the civilians in sight were being tangled together to clog the streets, he was going to have to run the roofs and hope to find both a cheese shop and an unblocked entrance to it in five minutes!

His ring beeped.

Four minutes.

“Hey, Chat Noir!"

A chain pulled taut at a sharp angle high above the next street caught Chat’s attention. It wasn’t the akuma back already…? 

No, he found when he peered over the gutter of the curved roof. The woman who apparently lived in the top floor apartment had managed to hook her chains into the elaborate wrought iron railing of her balcony. She had enough slack to beckon at him from where she was sitting on the icy concrete, looking thoroughly unimpressed with the world.

“Got a minute?” she called up.

“Not really,” Chat answered honestly. But she was stuck here, maybe he could detransform and sneak out through her front door. “What is it?”

She gestured inside the apartment with her chin. “Could you grab me the blanket off my couch?” He blinked incredulously. “What?” she asked. “It’s cold out here and I’ve got asthma.”

Another beep. Three minutes.

Chat rubbed at his face. “Okay this is going to sound stupid but do you have any Camembert?”

“What?” The balcony railing creaked faintly. “Shut up, stop that,” she snapped at it. Then, “No, but I’ve got, like, Brie if you want.”

Good enough. “Thanks!” Chat said, hopping down and rushing into the apartment. The blanket on the couch was a small fleece throw, much too small for using outdoors in the first week of March, so he checked behind several doors until he found the bedroom (and a thick comforter on the bed) and the bathroom (one inhaler in the medicine cabinet).

One minute.

He all but threw the comforter at her head, dropped the inhaler in her lap, and shut the privacy curtains just as the transformation fell.

“Brie?” Plagg whined.

“You like Brie,” Felix said, scooping up the kwami and heading into the apartment’s tiny kitchen. There were two unopened rounds of Brie in the fridge, plus half a lump of some hard, wine-rinded cheese Felix couldn’t identify. He unwrapped the mystery lump and one of the Bries for Plagg, tied the other in his loose dance overshirt for lack of pockets, and then dropped to hide behind the kitchen’s small bar/counter divider. It would protect his identity in case a breeze blew the curtains open.

“By the way,” Felix called through the open door as Plagg scarfed the cheese down. "Anything written on your handcuff?”

“Hm? Yeah, my creep of an ex-boss,” the lady replied, “and whoever wrote this thing can  _ stuff it. _ ”

That was one way to put it. “Amen,” Felix said. So, it wasn’t that everybody belonged to Papillon. Chained silent akuma, people being taken where they didn’t want to go, marked property of someone they had very good reason to stay away from...

Felix did not like where this was going.

“Plagg, claws out!”   
  
  


-0-0-0-

One bell-to-yoyo call later, Chat found Ladybug hiding behind a billboard for one of Adrien’s ads. He deliberately scuffed the back of the structure as he landed, to keep her from startling loudly, and landed in a crouch next to her.

“They’re taking people to some nasty bullies,” she told him, expression dark. “I ran into Chloe Bourgeois. She has about twenty chains dragging people to her, which I am not the  _ least  _ bit surprised by.”

“It’s worse than that, my Lady,” Chat said, and she looked at him in complete disbelief. “I said I got caught! And that had to cataclysm my way out?” he prompted. “They’ll take us right to Papillon.”

Her eyes went wide, and then her expression darkened as if she  _ hadn’t actually thought of that yet _ . “And I’m guessing they’d land us there helpless to fight and protect our kwamis.”

Chat didn’t have to answer. Papillon would have never picked this victim if he’d end up with both superheroes in his face and ready to take him down, but if they were delivered bound and helpless, this was the perfect akuma for his purposes. “I can get myself out with Cataclysm, or you, but not both of us at once.” Unless he got a very lucky angle and could grab both sets of chains. He was not about to count on Ladybug’s luck overriding his own, though.

“Hm. That’s a problem,” Ladybug said. “Because while you were recharging, I think I figured out her akuma object.” Her eyes met his, firm and serious. “And we’re going to need Cataclysm to get it.”

Which meant Chat had zero shots in case of capture, not just one. Chat groaned. “I am not going to like this, am I?”

She told him.

He didn’t.   
  


-0-0-0-

It took checking another bystander’s AkumaApp to track the woman down, but she’d gone north to Ile-De-La-Cite, and taken position atop the needlenose spire of Sainte-Chapelle as the approximate centerpoint of the city.

They split up at Notre-Dame, at the other end of the island. Chat circled to the north shore, and crept towards Sainte-Chapelle via the riverside wing of the hospital roof. Ladybug swung west, across the plaza before Notre-Dame and onto the police station.

The plan was painfully simple. Ladybug would distract the akuma, knock away chains with her yoyo, and hopefully not get caught. She’d only summon a Lucky Charm if something went very, very wrong with Chat’s half of the plan… which was to hide behind the cupola on the courthouse roof, Cataclysm ready, and pounce as soon as the akuma was close enough to see the gleam of her object.

Chat didn’t know how to tell Ladybug he wasn’t sure he had enough precision to succeed. Jour did -- Jour had been thrown at an akuma and only dissolved a sash instead of blasting a gaping hole in its chest -- but Nuit… Nuit’s ring  _ leaked _ .

He swallowed. He had to do this. If he got it wrong…

The akuma’s wedding ring flashed bright gold in the setting sunlight.

Chat leapt for her left hand, Cataclysm sizzling at his fingertips--

_ Just the gold just the gold just the gold just the gold _

\-- and every scrap of metal on the akuma’s body dissolved. Chat barely noticed the violet-black butterfly being captured or cleansed. The woman was bleeding where the steel mask had cut into her cheeks and jaw; without the heavy chains distracting the eye, the blue spots all up and down her arms were clearly finger-sized bruises.

The Miraculous Ladybug spell swarmed over her, leaving a tall woman huddled on the ground, makeup streaked away from where it had been hiding dark circles under her eyes. She wore a flower-patterned skirt too thin for the weather, and a black cardigan buttoned too high for comfort or style.

Something about the akuma’s slump, or maybe Chat’s expression, made Ladybug stop short with her fist half-raised for the usual fistbump. She paused, looked at the woman, then met Chat’s gaze and bit her lip.

_ No, I don’t know what to do for her either, Ladybug _ , Chat thought.

“... The…” The woman flinched at Ladybug’s voice. “... The akuma unit will be here soon. To. Help?” No response, unless you counted the woman ducking her head just that bit farther so that her light brown hair fell to hide her face.

Ladybug stifled a sigh, then looked at Chat. “You need to go. I’ll make sure she gets home safe.”

“I don’t want to go home,” the woman rasped, the words torn from her throat and barely audible even to Chat.

Chat’s ring beeped insistently, the pattern for the second time. But… this woman, a collapsed little huddle of something broken and terrified… “So don’t,” he replied.

Her dark eyes snapped up to meet his. “It’s not that simple!” she hissed.

_ Magic trust. You’d better work like I need you to right now _ . “Yes,” Chat said, flat and pitiless. “It is.”  _ Believe me, dammit. _

His ring beeped a third time, and Chat ran for the rooftops once more.

He didn’t even make it off the island before he had to drop behind a chimney and let Plagg recharge off the second wheel of Brie.

Felix curled up against the chimney, trying not to shiver for these few minutes that he was in light dancewear instead of Chat’s suit. If he started to shake, he didn’t think he would stop, and it wasn’t the temperature. It was that… Felix didn’t want to go home, either.

Not in the same way as the nameless victim, who hopefully would speak to the akuma unit’s counselor and take Chat’s words to heart, but… he didn’t want to explain this akuma to Adrien. Adrien would have to know in case of interviews, or being pounced by Alya, but Felix did  _ not want to explain _ .

“C’mon, kid,” Plagg said quietly, hovering near his knee. “Let’s go.”

Not home, Felix noticed. Just, go. “... Plagg?” No response, until a long enough moment passed that Plagg realized Felix wasn’t starting the transformation sequence. Then Plagg hummed in inquiry. “Just how much can you control the luck?”

“... Tough question, kid. Not sure we share enough vocabulary to tell you right. Why?”

“No reason.” Felix shrugged, not sure what he was getting at himself. Maybe that he just didn't want to have to ask Plagg to be kind right now. “Weird luck and I stuck you with Brie.” But could he please, despite that...?

“Say no more.” Plagg winked, smirking. “Two Camemberts when we get home and it’s a deal.”

Felix had no idea what he was agreeing to. But, “Fine.” Whatever. “Claws out.”

The Musee d’Orsay had a small patch of ice on top of its lowest roof, over a gate in the back. Chat should really have asked what Plagg thought he was saying, because he got to find the ice the hard way, and yelped as he skidded right off the roof, tail catching in a crack in the stone and leaving him to dangle in front of the gate.

“I meant to do that,” he muttered, because if someone was recording (his goddamn luck) he might as well make this video not need terrible joke captions when it went online.

“Hey, you okay, dude?”

Ah. Nevermind being the next viral cat video. Plagg had decided Chat wanted the punishment luck. That had definitely  _ not _ been what Chat meant. “No,” he told Nino, too done (again) to not be honest. “I hate my life.”

He could feel the weight of Nino’s stare. It lasted far too long. “... Okay, dude,” Nino finally said. “Not gonna make you talk.” Which was startling enough to drag Chat’s head up to look at the guy. (The coat was not nearly as blinding blue under gold-tinged streetlamps.) Nino jerked his thumb over his shoulder, back down the way Chat had come from. “Wanna come with me, get your mind off it?”

His  _ life _ . Plagg. Goddamn akuma. Stupid tail. Stupid ice. Stupid Nino Lahiffe being halfway decent and giving him an excuse to not go home.

If he truly couldn’t stand the awful indie metal or whatever Nino was going to see, he could always just leave anyway.

“Sure,” Chat finally said. “Walking around the streets of Paris being mobbed cannot make my night any worse.”

Nino huffed with somewhat sympathetic amusement. “Don’t worry, dude,” he said as Chat lifted himself up, managed to yank his tail free, and dropped easily onto the street without landing on any ice this time thank you Plagg. “I got a friend with the same problem. We’ll take a moblin path.”

A what?

“Y’know, mobless, kinda sounds like the monsters in Zelda games, so… moblin,” Nino said. “And bonus, we can talk about it and just sound like nerds instead of like we’re sneaking my friend around behind the fans’ backs.”

It was even completely in-character. Adrien loved Zelda and was a total nerd. “... Clever.”

Nino grinned. “Yeah, we thought so. This way.”

Nino led Chat through quiet, tree-lined streets and narrow alleys that Chat would never have thought could exist this close to the central Seine and its cluster of tourist attractions. He very quickly lost most sense of direction as they climbed over parking gates and cut through winter-bare gardens and restaurant kitchens where the staff very studiously did not see either of them.

In one kitchen where the staff had tattoos and bright streaks of color in their short-or-tied-back hair, they were plating up tapas -- very distinct from hors d’oeuvres -- and a dark-skinned young woman washing dishes glanced up when Nino came in. “Ah, Nino!” something something “Adrien?” Then Chat stepped through, and her eyes went wide behind her glasses. “Ooooh. Go talk to Mãe,” she said in a thick accent that wasn’t quite Spanish. “Private tables in the loft are open.”

“Thanks. We’ll try to make as many dishes for you as possible,” Nino promised with mock-pious cheer.

“Shoo!”

Nino ducked her soapy swat, laughing, and led Chat into a dimly-lit hallway. “Stay here a mo’,” he said, gesturing, before heading around a corner where the soft clinks and murmurs of a busy restaurant could be heard, with someone speaking in unintelligible cadence over the background noise.

That wasn’t music. What were they here for? Had the band just not started yet?

Nino returned quickly with another woman, top-heavy and wearing the crisp jacketless suit of a Parisian hostess with a brightly-striped homespun scarf instead of a black tie. She looked enough like the dishwasher that this had to be her mother. “Ah, Mystery Friend,” she said in the same thick accent. “Loft is yours, Jadzia will be your server.”

Chat blinked. “Star Trek fan?” he asked before he could help it.

“Sim, Deep Space Nine.” She grinned. “Worf's a very handsome man.”

“He’s got a voice that just won’t quit,” Nino agreed. Chat couldn’t remember the show well enough to know if he shared that opinion or not. “Come on,” Nino continued, leaning back to peer around the corner again. “They’re about to start the next set.”

The stairs to the loft were at the other end of the hallway, blocked off by a white plastic chain that Nino unhooked and gestured Chat past. Narrow and close, the staircase opened up to a small, dim balcony squeezed between heavy cross-braces holding up the roof. There were only three small tables here, none suited for more than three people, but the chairs were fine wood and thickly padded with old, deep garnet velvet. Nino swapped out the chairs at the table nearest the room’s overlook with a pair of chairs that had arms, and set out menus that he must’ve gotten off the hostess.

“I’m still a year too young,” Nino said, pushing the wine list over. “They’ve got a good non-alcohol list though.”

Chat gave up. Nino had already figured out he was a teenager. “I’m too young too,” he said, pushing the list back to the center of the table, and taking up the regular menu to avoid looking at Nino. “... Also, I, ah, should’ve mentioned this,” he added when his eyes caught on the prices.

“No room for money in the suit.”

“... Er. Yes.”

“My invite, my treat. Just don’t order, like, ten plates of stuff.”

“Generous,” Chat murmured. “I’ll keep it to nine.” A light round of applause went up below, and he peered over the cross-beam and down into the restaurant proper. There was a small stage set up with a spotlight, a stool, and a microphone, and the wall behind it had a large poster of the graying woman sitting onstage, shuffling to the next page in a sheaf of papers.

“This next one’s something I did listening to one of my favorite musicians," she announced, her voice low and measured. “The guy wrote about the simple man, about the difference between lonely and alone, about the emptiness of ambition and the fullness of loving what you do… let’s see if you guys know him too. This is  _ A Word To My First Husband _ .

_ "It wasn’t til recently that _ __   
_ men divined cause from effect, _ __   
_ and found that thunder did not cause _ __   
_ milk to spoil, but was merely  _ __   
_ a symptom of the storms of summer, _ _   
_ __ someplace that was not Paradise..."

Chat felt his ears perk. “A poetry night?” he had to ask, glancing at Nino.

“I know, I don’t seem the sort, right?” Nino replied easily. “It’s lyrics, man. You can’t just throw any old words at a tune and hope they’ll stick.”

Not entirely against his will, Chat could feel himself relaxing.

There would always be bad days. But he didn’t have to be pitied for them.

He picked the menu back up. “All right. What’s good here?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warning: akuma is a victim of domestic abuse.


	4. Chapter 4

It had _not_ been a date.

"You're welcome," Plagg told him, sniggering behind the tip of his tail. 

Felix glared up at the kwami from the depths of his pillow. "You know perfectly well that last night was _not_ what I asked for."

"No," Plagg agreed too easily, before he sobered slightly. "But it was what you needed. That's about as good as I can make the luck go." Then his whiskers perked into a gleeful smirk again. "Needing the noisy boy--"

"Oh shut up. Just don't run me into him again."

"Tonight?" Plagg asked, before shrugging casually. "Sure. I don't have to anyway. You're seeing him tomorrow, remember?"

He had, in fact, _not_ remembered. Felix dragged the pillow out from under his face and whapped the cackling kwami out of the air.  


-0-0-0

Fortunately for all concerned, Adrien took Plagg with him to pretty much everything. Including the photoshoot (Sublime's entire summer catalog was being shot this month), which Adrien had left for in full zombie mode at 7 in the morning.

Felix thanked his one spot of luck, that he wasn't anywhere near emotive enough for the camera, and slept another three hours before wandering downstairs to get his nutritionist-approved breakfast.

Just him.

Alone, with his coffee and grapefruit.

In silence.

He only finished a bit too fast because it was cold and boring in the kitchen. No other reason.

When Felix got back to his room, his phone was buzzing on the nightstand where it had finished charging, the quick pattern of a text rather than the calendar app alarm. Not that -- he glanced at the time -- not that his calendar was set to alert for the dance project session for another fifty minutes.

A short series of texts popped up when he unplugged his phone, all from Nino.

Today at 10:13 am

_wrong window sorry_

Today at 10:12 am

_alya babe its a pretty word but i dunno what precedent means_

Today at 10:11 am

_I mean, like, whenever you get this._

Today at 10:07 am

_Hey mind if I come over early? Alya's blowing up my phone but she'll take "I'm on the clock" for an answer._

Ugh. But they _had_ cut the session short last week...

Felix unlocked the phone and texted back before he could change his mind.

_I'll inform Natalie to expect you._

So much for catching up on his reading. Felix headed for his closet to change and start warmups before Nino arrived.

Maybe Nino would look normal (aggravating) today.

No such luck. When Nino arrived, he was back in the green-and-black knit cap, but had left the blinding coat at home. Considering it would probably either spontaneously combust or make the house do so if it got inside -- and certainly would do exactly that to Felix's father's eyes if he ever saw it on the security videos -- perhaps that was for the best.

It meant this Nino was still unfairly too much like the Nino that was nice to Chat, though.

"Come in," Felix said, using the door to block most of the early March chill. He really should've just had Natalie bring Nino in. Where was his judgement lately.

"Yeah, hi," Nino said, stomping slush off his shoes onto the mat. "Man, isn't it spring yet?"

Felix didn't get a chance to answer (it wasn't, not officially for another two weeks), because Nino's phone went off, fortunately not with the akuma alert.

Nino winced apologetically, then pulled his phone out of his pocket. "Sorry, forgot to put it on mute," he muttered, quickly tapping at the screen. "I said Alya's been kinda going nuts? If you heard about the last akuma, they arrested the lady's husband. Alya's still all," he circled his hand vaguely, and Felix easily read _shrieking her little reporter heart out_ from it. "...yeah." He pocketed the phone again and made a rueful face. "Seriously though, like what kind of moron do you have to be to mistreat your wife or anybody while Papillon's out there anyway?"

Felix leveled a flat stare at Nino and waited. It took a good minute for Nino to connect the dots and wince.

"... Um."

"In my father's defense," Felix said, "few people would've expected someone over the age of ten to get that upset about a friend's birthday party."

"Aw c'mon, dude," Nino whined. "It was also that your father is terrifying as heck."

Felix just glared, because that wasn't the least bit true if you weren't a business rival, and that was just _business_. Why must people equate reserved to frightening so much?

He thought he heard Nino mutter 'dude, you're scary too' as he led him back to the studio, but if Nino really thought that he wouldn't be such a jerk to Felix's face about everything.

... Then again, Nino was friends with Alya and Marinette, and one thing you couldn't say about either of them was that they were shy with their opinions...

Whatever. Who knew how the Nino's brain worked.

"Okay, so," Nino said as he set up his keyboard. "The song is kind of a hot mess right now. I mean, I've got most of the notes," he explained, "but except for the first, like, ten seconds and that kabuki thing, none of it's transposed to the right instruments. I can get it out in keyboard in about twenty minutes if you don't mind weird overtones, or by Thursday if you want a clean copy, but," his expression went wry, "I just had to go for weird rare instruments. Final product will be a few weeks coming."

Felix tried not to sigh. "We don't exactly have a full orchestra pit in the studio," he pointed out. Just the fact that Nino had 'most of the notes' already, all of two weeks in to the project... the mind boggled. And he'd been out far too many evenings last week. When on earth was he doing his homework? No wonder his grades were middling at best. "I'm used to working with mediocre recordings and lone pianos."

"Don't say I didn't warn you, dude," Nino replied flatly, and hit play.

It didn't start out badly, though the unexpected lone cello note dying away made Felix blink. It faded almost to nothing before a gentle chime shimmered in. It split into a chord and switched to piano to repeat itself for the three rond de jambes, then held to fade. That kabuki sound came in, almost imperceptibly soft under a melody that switched distractedly between acoustic guitar and more piano. The tempo seemed to shift a bit under the instruments, though Felix couldn't tell if that was an artifact of the instrumentation or an intentional point. If it was intentional, he could do a bit of 'snowflake blowing about on random breezes', put in some spins to keep interest -- and, as a flute joined in and jumped the melody up a few notes, and the piano-guitar part continued in soft harmonizing -- yes, if he kept the first section with a horizontal-low focus and some spinning, when the flute came in he could cast the attention upwards for the aurora imagery Nino had noted.

Yes, focus goes up, express awe and wonder... the aurora would probably be the first color an arctic snow spirit ever saw, if it was far enough north that the sun had set weeks earlier. Some leaps, then. Be distracted by the aurora, no looking at the audience... hm. He'd still need to drop his focus back down to keep the audience watching the dance instead of the scenery, not that there would be scenery for the recital but if this were part of a full ballet there would be.

The music cut off abruptly mid-melody.

"Sorry, dude. Haven't got the last few measures pinned down yet." Nino leaned against the back of his chair. "So. Yeah, hot mess, right?"

"... To some extent, yes," Felix said.

"Dude, you aren't supposed to agree so easy."

Why ever not? "You said it, not me." Felix turned away to eye the studio space and mentally map some of the thoughts he'd been having. "Play it again."

He walked the path this time, not quite dancing but just to get the feel of the blocking. Forward on that lone cello note, the entrance as though he'd been blown in, chasing the vanished autumn sun -- oh, _that's_ what it was. Pause, first note to get him turned around, the chords back and hold, enter the melody. Distracted tempo tossing him about, criss-cross back and forth on the center mark... perhaps a spin at the center and one at each spoke of a snowflake shape as he went back and forth? It might not be readily apparent even to balcony seating, but-- oh, shoot, he'd missed the entrance of the aurora.

"Take it back to before the flute," he told Nino. "Give me an eight-count on it, too."

... Right, he thought, as he considered the piano-guitar mix. He still wasn't sure if he was imagining the tempo shift, but the music was definitely giving off that impression here. It'd be difficult to catch the aurora. Not impossible, but... wait, he could just ask. "Are you messing with the tempo here?"

"Uh, no? Not on purpose," Nino answered. "Lemme mark that, I'll check the clips when I get home. Do you want me to play around with it if it's just a weird effect?"

It could be an interesting challenge, or it could just put the audience off. "I'll think on that," Felix said noncommittally. "Back to the eight-count, please."

"... Yeah. Got it."

All right. Five six and hit the mark, drop arms and straighten, turn in awe. He'd been criss-crossing for the low part, now perhaps a spiral, eyes always up on the 'sky'. Or no, he'd been thinking he needed to drop his focus to bring the audience back down to the dance. Put that aside for later refinement. He felt that his eyes would be up, so... up, for now.

And the music cut off abruptly again, with Felix angled to stare awkwardly towards the ceiling above the left wing, facing away from the audience. That was not going to go over well.

He let his arms drop. "How long do you have left on the song?"

"About, like, forty seconds max. Which is kind of an eternity in song time."

"All right." That was far better than, say, the ten or fifteen that Felix had somehow thought Nino meant by having 'most' of the notes. "Let's take it from the top."

And this time, Felix danced.

(He did miss the aurora entrance, much to his chagrin, and he really needed to decide what order to do the spokes of the snowflake in, and the music once again left him posed awkwardly after nearly a minute of having his eyes on the ceiling. He should probably consider himself lucky he hadn't tripped over his own feet, but this was still blocking-- he wasn't doing anything particularly complicated or interesting with the footwork yet.)

"Huh," Nino said, while Felix was thinking all this. "You're moving a little different than you were last week."

Felix glanced over his shoulder. A little different? He'd barely done anything last week. Just the entrance and the opening rond de jambes.

"Kinda, I dunno," Nino continued hastily, not that that clarified anything. Then he mock-whistled, soundless and airy. (Felix's gaze caught on Nino's mouth for a second, which was one second too long.) "Like that, you know? Woosh."

Woosh? The sound had been windy, not speedy. "... Distant?" Felix tried.

"Yeah, that, kinda." So _eloquent_ . Arrgh. (' _Lyrics, man. Can't throw any old words at--_ ') _Shut up, memory_. "I'll wanna work more windy sounds in if you keep it."

"How about you finish the song first?" Felix said. "We can work on refinement after that."

"Geez, picky."

Felix just wanted it to work. What was so wrong with that? "Back to the top."

It was going to be a long day.  


-0-0-0  


On Wednesday morning, Nino threw an arm around Adrien's shoulders before they even got into the classroom, hand brushing against Felix's shoulder. He didn't seem to notice, but Felix twitched away anyway. "Adrien," Nino said grandly. "My bro. My bestie. My favorite stealth nerd. Prince of puns, aspiring Mythtern, greatest geek in designer chic. Today," and he spread his hand vaguely towards the upper corner of the hallway like he was brushing a curtain aside to show wonders, "is a magical day. A day in which I will blow your mind. Your future most favorite day of the year."

"It's Pi Day," Adrien said.

"It's Pi Day," Nino agreed.

Well. There went any hope of not eating with Nino at lunch. Felix internally sighed and pulled out his phone, ignoring the increasing nerdery next to him as he texted Natalie.

_We will be studying math during the lunch period today. Please inform the chef._

"Where are we going, then?" he asked with studied disinterest, and pretended not to notice Nino's nonplussed look.

"We?" Nino echoed.

Felix displayed the texts to Adrien, which happened to let Nino see as well. "We," he repeated flatly, and watched Nino's face fall. "I hope it's worth --" _lying to Natalie and having to interact with you openly hating me_ "-- it."

"Hey! Best bakery in Paris!" Nino snapped.

Ah. "The Dupain-Chengs, then, I presume," which took the wind out of Nino's sails. Felix pocketed his phone. "Acceptable." Even if it did have the additional headache of watching Marinette panic continuously over Adrien's existence. An anxiety prescription would not go amiss with that one.

Sure enough, when lunch rolled around and Adrien fell into step with Alya and Nino instead of breaking off for the limo, Marinette flailed a bit, cast Alya a very telling look of _warn me about things omg_ , and then beamed at Adrien with a bit too much tooth.

The lunch line at the T&S Boulangerie was out the door, people bundled up in a multitude of coats, tapping at their phones or -- in one or two cases -- swinging or bouncing small children in brightly-colored puffy coats. The line almost hid the large sign in the window: _π Day! All tartes and caneles_ _€3.14!_

Felix headed for the end of the line, but stumbled when Alya caught his elbow, breezing past it in Marinette's wake and hauling him along. (Nino had Adrien, he saw out of the corner of his eye.) Around the side of the wedge-shaped building, a discreet door had house numbers and a mailbox up, and Marinette led them inside.

This stairwell, unlike the one at Nino's, was all white and sunlight, and the staircase itself narrow with an iron-wrought railing. On the ground level with them, a plain door led into what had to be the bakery's kitchen; up the stairs, a white door fronted with vertically-lined glass had no lock.

Felix was still a bit disconcerted to discover a family home behind that door. Peach furniture formed an airy living room to the right; to the left, chic black and glass cabinetry formed a small kitchen, tucked under a narrow iron staircase so steep it was nearly a ladder instead.

On the dining table marking the kitchen off from the foyer, three cake stands displayed an assortment of pastries under glass domes. The symmetry of the row was marred, though, by a can that looked as though it'd started life as a coffee tin. It'd been painted since, a pink lace pattern on white, probably done by simply basting a piece of actual lace in place over a pink base coat and spraying the entire thing white before removing the fabric.

Ribbon had been glued to cover the rim, and the old black lid now had a slot cut neatly into it. Marinette lifted the can and shook it, coins jingling inside. "The ritual donation, please."

Alya ceremoniously plopped three euro coins in, and Nino another fourteen cents.

"May the math gods bless us," Marinette said.

"Solved x," Alya and Nino replied.

O... kay? Nino certainly needed the help, Felix thought.

Adrien was practically bouncing on his toes. "Do we--?" he asked, already reaching for his wallet.

"Oh, no!" Marinette yelped. "I mean! You don't have to! You're good-- we're good! I mean." She managed to catch a deep breath. "I mean. Um. My parents aren't expecting any more money?"

Alya patted Marinette's shoulder. "Chill, girl. Adrien, don't worry about the money. It's just a joke." That had been... well, not obvious, but reasonable, considering how they'd only 'paid' for one instead of entire batches. Felix sighed. Adrien had just wanted to play too, why couldn't they see that? "We aren't paying for the food. It's all stuff that came out a little too wonky-looking to sell anyway."

"Yeah, dude," Nino said. "And it's not like you guys need the math blessing anyway. Come on, let's eat."  
  


-0-0-0-

  


He should've taken the math blessing.

Felix normally had no problem with math. It was nice, sometimes, having one and only one right answer, and more mentally engaging than, say, some of the history questions where that one-right-answer was just a matter of finding the name or date in the textbook. But he'd had to postpone a couple of assignments due to akuma nonsense, and now he was paying the price in having three nights' worth of math due Friday instead of just one.

At this point, he was starting to feel a little punchy, for all that it wasn't that late yet. He blamed the bakery. One too many just-one-mores of the sweet instead of the savory pastries. Yes, it was the sugar's fault that he was starting to feel very ambivalent towards that x.

_Bzzt bzzt bzzt._

... Now what? Had Natalie just had to pull one of the same last-minute update stunts to his schedule that she kept doing to Adrien...?

No, he saw, as he tilted up his phone and saw the alert.

Felix let his head thump onto his homework. Damn it all. "Plagg. Claws out."

They found the akuma boating around on the Seine near Bercy.

"Since when do akuma come with accessories?" Ladybug asked, giving the ship the same nonplussed look Chat was. Considering it looked like Cap'n Crunch's pirate ship built for one, so round-bottomed and high in the water that it had to be staying afloat by magic rather than physics, it really deserved the skeptical stare.

The akuma yanked at something on its tiny deck, and its equally tiny, stubby cannon blasted a cannonball about three times its barrel's size at a strip of joyless warehouse storefronts on the shore. Smoke exploded where it hit, but the screams that went up sounded more like surprise and fear than pain.

Chat hated that he could tell the difference so easily.

"Well, let's aim for the boat, see if that does anything," Ladybug said, and bounded off.

There was no way it was going to be that easy, Chat thought, but he gamely followed, circling over the river via the Periph' bridge to flank the akuma. ( _Baton_ , Plagg, why must you make two different suits?)

The boat -- there was no other way to describe it -- bounced on the water's surface, swinging its prow to face Chat, thus leaving its stern pointed downriver and Ladybug's way. At that angle, Chat had a much better view of the akuma than before. It was, indeed, pirate-themed, with the skull-and-crossbones replaced with a butterfly-and-crossbones, and both its hands were blunt wooden pegs. "Arrrrr!"

"I don't want to know," Chat muttered. Blunt wooden pegs for both hands? _Why?_

"I be Three Sheets! C'mere an' fight me, y'scurvy cat! I'll loot yer Miraculous!"

Chat stared incredulously. "I _really_ don't want to know."

Alas, he was going to have to find out.

_BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!_

_After_ he dodged the cannonballs. Chat leapt for the next pylon, then the next, flailing and throwing his weight backwards in midair when the shot hit it faster than he expected.

SPLOOSH.

Chat clawed to the surface of the Seine, hissing and spitting away foul, foul river water. _Wet I hate you I hate this akuma I hate the river hate hate haaaaate_

Pale smoke clouded his vision, the dregs from the cannon fire spooling heavy and thick onto the surface of the water and over his head. It didn't smell like much, at least not much that he could tell over the stink of the river so close to his nose, but it left the air warm and a little bit hazy, and the water a little bit heavier where it dragged at his limbs.

Something small splashed in the water next to him, and a line looped around his chest and yanked him sailing up and out onto the riverbank. He landed hard, that strange smoky warmth still weighing on his body, and lay sprawled on his back with gravity slowly rotating underneath him.

"Ladybug?" he murmured, as her worried face came into view. "I feel funny."

"The smoke's making people drunk," she told him. "How much did you breathe in?"

Drunk. It just figured. His father was going to kill him. "Too much." He tried to push himself upright, and the ground tilted underhand and smacked him in the face. "Ow."

Ladybug said something nasty under her breath, but Chat couldn't quite understand it over the rattle of chains against the sidewalk. Why did it have to keep being chains. It was chains just last week. Boooooring. And not the good kind of boring that was peaceful and calm, either--

Ladybug yelped and vanished.

... Vanished was bad, right? Chat placed his hands carefully wide, fingers splayed and claws digging into the sidewalk, and pushed himself straight up. If he made very sure not to move when the ground did...

"Put me down!" Ladybug shrieked.

The akuma had her stretched upside-down high above the bow of the ship. "Lawpig landlubbers get keelhauled!" Three Sheets yelled.

"Keel _what_?!"

Chat found himself moving before he quite decided to do it. The ground hit him again, scraping his chin -- ow, at least Plagg would easily fix that -- and then spun underfoot and lurched at him again.

Something caught him around the waist and pulled him behind a trash can. The damned _chains--_ Chat twisted, and very luckily for Nino only managed to knock his hat off.

"Whoa, easy dude, it's just me!"

Behind them, Ladybug's startled yelp and gasp cut off with a large splash, but Nino only barely glanced that way before turning back to Chat. "It's okay. It's three meters and she got a breath in. We have a minute for you to catch your balance."

"Nino." He didn't understand. Adrien would be upset if Ladybug got hurt. "I can't." The ground tipped again when he shook his head, but Nino's arms only tightened instead of letting the ground come up and hit Chat again. "I have to--"

"Dude. Breathe. Think." He looked back at the river. Chat, following his gaze, saw that the akuma was completely distracted with slowly dragging its chains along the side of the boat. Keel haul. Drag someone the entire way along the underside of a ship, as punishment or torment or initiation ritual. "You've got that Cataclysm thing, right?" Nino asked, and Chat looked back at him. Nino's eyes were bright and intent on the akuma, though. "Ladybug said to get the boat?"

The boat. Right. "Yeah. I have to." But. "But Ladybug..." He had to get her first. Adrien would.

"Okay, no, listen. Okay?" Nino nodded to himself. "Grab the chains and the boat at the same time."

... Why hadn't Chat thought of that. "Same time," he repeated blankly. That was. That. "Nino, you're brilliant." Help why was Nino brilliant.

"Not really," Nino said, which was also weird (why was Nino agreeing with him), "but okay. Come on, then--" And he pulled Chat's arm over his shoulders, checked past the trash can one more time, then got Chat mostly up off the ground and pushed them into a shambling, half-ducked run across the road to fetch up against the river's safety railing.

Ohhhh that was not fun, Chat's stomach--

"Just hold still and get your balance back, dude," Nino said, peering through a gap between rail posts. "It'll be one leap to grab the things -- man, this guy's going slow. Turn broadside already-- so just lemme be your eyes right now."

If only. Nino's eyes wouldn't have the view Chat's did. Why are you so hot when you're nice?

Nino blushed brightly and twitched. "Wh-what?!" He barely managed to stifle his yelp, staring wide-eyed at Chat.

No. No no no no no.

Nino shook his head sharply. "Ladybug," he muttered. "Rescue first. Okay, he's--" More splashing in the river. "-- dunked her again. He's turning, though-- right." Nino got his (large, warm, shaking) hands under Chat's shoulders and turned him to face the river, the stone railing cool against Chat's burning forehead and blocking Chat's view. "Get Cataclysm ready."

"Why aren't you drunk," Chat moaned.

"Pure luck. I was upwind. Cataclysm, Chat."

Grumbling, the stone swaying under his face, Chat pulled Cataclysm to his fingertips. Chains and boat. Metal chains, wooden boat. Nothing else.

"Four. Three. Two. GO."

Chat's leap was more of a throw, Cataclysm outstretched, eyes only for the chains and shipside that was his target.

Whether the akuma was in the boat or the chains, Chat couldn't tell. He splashed into the Seine (UGH), the world spinning as he flailed uselessly in the water. Somewhere off to the side, though, the world went a faint, warm pink, and the bubbles surrounding him fizzed against his suit like a spray of pebbles.

He found himself coughing on the riverbank, dry and dizzy, with a swirl of magical ladybugs spinning around Nino and away. There was a man a bit past Nino, in his early thirties or so, squirming on the ground with his hands cuffed behind his back. "Screw you all!" he slurred. "Fuck th'police! Sidin' with a buncha corporate as--"

"Aaaand that's enough out of you," Ladybug said, covering the man's mouth with one hand. "Chat, you okay? Nino?"

"Fine, Ladybug!" Nino squeaked, back to staring at Chat wide-eyed and bright red.

_I actually told him he's hot._

"Fine," Chat managed. And even, "I have to go," as his ring beeped.

He fled.  


-0-0-0  


The Miraculous Ladybug spell was almost perfect. _Almost_. It apparently did absolutely nothing for however much magical alcohol Felix had metabolized into toxic byproducts before it'd actually taken the magic part out of his bloodstream.

Between that and the painfully little sleep Felix had gotten, steeping wide-awake in his own embarrassment for hours with his head pounding, the next morning was...

Well.

There were some things coffee could not help.

Alya Cesaire was another of them. " _I am going to find out who this guy is_ ," she declared, brandishing one fist at the ceiling and clutching her phone to her chest as Felix walked tiredly into the classroom staring blankly at his own phone.

Uh huh. Whatever you say, Alya.

"Come on, I mean, _look at this_ ." She mashed her phone at Felix's face, making him blink and lean back, eyes crossing. What on _earth--_?! "Somebody's gotta recognize a coat like that, right?"

Her phone had video up, playing a very shaky, tilted piece of last night's fight. Oh ugh. He looked even worse from this angle, flopping around like a Hollywood concussion victim on Nino's shoulder and blocking most of the view of Nino's head.

Movement at the edge of Felix's vision caught his attention. It was actually easier to see Nino, waving his arms in a frantic _no_ gesture behind Alya, than to see the screen this close to his nose.

"... Very memorable." Normally Felix would have no mercy, but Alya hadn't even let him sit down or asked his opinion politely. He pushed the phone back out of his personal space with one finger. "Fortunately for me, I would remember if I'd ever seen such a blinding tragedy."

Which was, of course, entirely true. He remembered Nino's coat all too well. He just didn't need to say he recognized it.

Alya blinked, then peered at her screen, derailed. "It's not that bad, is it?"

"Yes, it is." Nino was, for some reason, gaping at Felix. "What is with you?" Felix asked the boy sharply.

Nino snapped his arms down to his sides. " _Nothing_ ," he squeaked when Alya glanced over her shoulder at him.

"Are you okay?" she asked Nino after a moment. "You're looking kind of... off."

 _Oh this should be good_ , Felix thought dourly as Nino visibly panicked. How many seconds until Nino blurted out that he was the guy with the coat. Ten? Five?

"It's just, ah, um, that is, I. Well. You know. Uh."

Twenty, perhaps. Let the flailing get out of the way so words could fall out.

And then Nino's eyes widened faintly, and he leaned in a little bit. "Alya," he said seriously, almost too quiet for Felix to hear. Not that he was listening, but they'd apparently forgotten they were blocking the way to his seat. "Am I hot?"

"What?" she asked.

What.

 _No_. No, that was not an acceptable distraction!

"Wait no I mean not like--!" Nino flapped his hands as if to bat away the idea that he was asking Alya for personal reasons. "I mean someone said I was and I'm like. Um?" He gave Alya a rather hapless kittenish look. _Thank you Nino, that does not help_ , Felix thought with stiff-necked horror. _Please stop and drop the subject and let me get you out of my line of sight without being noticed._ "He was kind of half-asleep," that only made things _worse_ ; Alya was going to take that _entirely_ the wrong way, "so I dunno if he meant it or what--"

" _He?_ " Alya echoed with poorly hidden delight.

"Um," Nino said.

"Well accept the compliment for one," Alya told him. "Is he cute?" Nino's entire face went red. "That's not a yes or a no."

Nino glanced away, winced when he saw how close Felix was -- Felix pretended to be paying more attention to his phone than them -- then leaned a little bit closer. "He is _so out of my league,_ okay?"

"Who told you that?" Alya snapped, and Nino jerked away. "Did he tell you that?!" she added. " _I will end him_ \--"

"Alya, babe, no!"

"Seriously, Nino, if he makes you think that, he's not worth it--"

"He doesn't, okay, geez, chill!"

Which was when Marinette raced in, scarce centimeters ahead of Mme. Bustier, tripped over the bottom step of the risers, and landed neatly in Alya and Nino's arms when they lunged to catch her. Which freed up the path for Felix to get to his seat and pretend he'd noticed nothing and his ears weren't burning.

Alya plopped Marinette into their shared seat, then cast a quick, dire look on Nino. "This isn't over," she informed him. She sat down next to a bewildered Marinette, turned on her tablet, and played diligent student as class began.  


-0-0-0

Nino fled the room with Adrien in tow as soon as the lunch bell rang. It did not help. Felix was only halfway down the stairs when...

"Lahiffe!" Alya shouted from the hallway above the locker bay. "I'm gonna end you!"

"Sorry Nino!" Marinette yelled after her.

... ah, Felix thought, planting himself against the wall when Alya stormed past. She'd identified the owner of the coat.

By the time he reached his locker, Alya had Nino pinned to the ground and her phone up to voice-record. "I sat down with--"

" _On_ ," Nino corrected, loud and grumpy.

"My _traitorous_ classmate, Nino Lahiffe, who _didn't tell me he helped Chat and Ladybug-_ -"

Hilarious. But. "Privacy law, Cesaire," Felix murmured.

"Bite me, Agreste. Stupid law," she muttered. "The _anonymous citizen_ who helped Chat and Ladybug in their fight against Three Sheets--"

"Seriously, babe, it was not a big deal! Get off me!"

Marinette peered nervously over Felix's shoulder. "I'm really sorry, Nino!"

"The citizen, who has been _personally rescued_ by Chat Noir before--"

"So've you!"

"--much like many dozens of other Parisians, including yours truly, said simply that anybody would've helped."

"Well yeah that's true... but I didn't say that!"

"His modesty," Alya finished ominously, "is underwhelming."

"Alyaaaaa."

Felix decided to leave them to it, and made his escape before Alya could make the connection between a magic-drunk Chat and a half-asleep mystery admirer.

( _Please by all the luck that isn't Plagg's, don't let her make that connection_ .)  
  


-0-0-0

  


If Alya ever made the connection, Felix was too far away to hear her reaction. She seemed to have calmed down by Friday, at least, and on Saturday her blog post about Three Sheets went up. It called Nino 'M. Coat' and 'anonymous citizen', and had a few quotes that read more like things Nino might actually say than things Alya made up that he happened to agree with, albeit slightly cleaned of his usual slang. That was probably to help the anonymity. Nino had a very distinctive way of speaking, after all.

... He also had a very distinctive, one of a kind eyesore of a coat.

... Felix should probably go make sure Nino knew not to wear the coat out for a while. Or, rather, Chat should. Not that Nino would be home, he was sure. Earlier that afternoon, yes, that was Ivan and Mylene's time, but in the evening...

Nino seemed to never be home in the evening, going by how often he'd run into Chat just these last couple of weeks.

So Nino wouldn't be home anyway if Chat happened to pass by, so it wasn't at all significant if Chat did. Maybe he could mention it to Nino's mother. Yes, that would work. Just happened to be passing by on patrol, thought of the coat when he saw the balcony, and--

Oh.

Nino was home.

 _Why_ was Nino home?

 _This is entirely your fault, Plagg_ , Chat thought as he landed silently on Nino's tiny balcony. (Truly, it didn't really deserve the name-- it was little more than a ledge with a wrought-iron railing to keep people from falling out the narrow doors.) Felix had never been this curious before the ring came to him and Adrien.

Nino was bent over his keyboard, large headphones on and eyes distant as he nodded slowly along to some unheard melody. He looked... well, no, there was the tiniest furrow between his brows, an unhappy cast to the corner of his mouth, and even as Chat watched Nino sighed explosively and flopped back in his chair. One dark finger poked a button on the keyboard, and then Nino pulled off his headphones and dropped them onto the keys.

That didn't look like progress. And as long as Chat wasn't interrupting...

He tapped on the glass.

Nino glanced up, blinked, then blushed deep red.

... Oops. He'd. Kind of. Been momentarily too successful at ignoring the awkwardness between them. Maybe he should just run while he--

No, too late. Nino had only needed one step to reach the French doors and open one with a lopsided, nervous grin that faded quickly to concern. "Hey dude. What's up?"

Er. "I was just passing by, and." And what? 'Didn't think you were home' would not go over well. Neither would 'saw your light on' or something else creepy like that. "... I realized I need to apologize for the other night?"

Nino blinked. "Hey, no, it's okay, dude. I'm actually," his blush deepened, and he ducked his head shyly to rub at the back of his neck. "Uh. Really flattered."

"Really." Not considering the way he'd been stuttering at Alya about it, he wasn't.

"Well _yeah_ ," Nino said. "You're all," he waved his hand at Chat. _Yes, thank you, I'd noticed the skintight black leather Plagg stuck us with,_ Felix thought. "And I'm kinda." Normally, if somewhat garishly, dressed, yes, so what. "So. Uh. Thanks?"

"... right." Chat cast about for something else to say. "... So what are you doing home, anyway? It seems like you're always out in the evening."

"I kinda am?" Nino admitted. "And, I mean, I would like to be. There's a couple places doing traditional Irish music, and it'd be really cool to see it, like, live, but," he shrugged, "they're also gonna be full of drunk tourists." Oh. Point. "So I'm just staying in and working on a thing for a couple friends of mine."

Chat's eyes slid past Nino to the keyboard he'd been frowning at before Chat knocked. "It doesn't seem to be going well."

"Yeah," Nino sighed. "It's really not." And he just looked so downcast... the sudden impulse that hit Chat was, again, entirely Plagg's fault he was sure.

 _I am going to regret this_. Chat sighed as well, crossing his arms and glancing away. "We could go," he offered.

"What? Go where?"

Where did he think? "To one of those Irish music places," Chat said. "I'm sure I could find a rooftop to listen from without the drunks."

"Seriously?!" Nino yelped. "I mean, yes, please, wow, um. Yes?" His blush was somehow even darker than before. "Just let me grab my coat and tell Maman I'm going out."

"Of course." Chat shifted on the narrow rail -- Plagg had given him preternatural balance, but the suit didn't do nearly enough about the discomfort of sitting on a railing only about as wide as his finger. "Oh!" Chat leaned forward as Nino opened his bedroom door. "Don't get the blue one," he reminded Nino. "The Ladyblogger's probably on the lookout for it."

Nino grinned sheepishly. "Yeah, she uh, already caught me once. But yeah, no reason to give her two blog posts in a row, I guess? I'll be right back. So uh. Yeah." And Nino vanished deeper into the apartment.

Chat's hearing picked up the words too easily, as Nino told his mother he was heading out.

"Wait, weren't you leaving?" she asked a moment later.

"Um, yeah," Nino replied, his voice approaching the bedroom door. "Just... kinda not out the front?"

"We don't have a back--" Nino's mother followed him to the bedroom and stopped short in the doorway. "--door. Chat Noir?"

What to say. This was not what it looked like? (Ugh no not that cliche, it always made people think the exact opposite. Which in this case was "adult, definitely an adult, superheroes are certainly not kids, trying to sneak your teenager out behind your back".) "... Madame."

"... Don't stay out too late, dear." Nino's mother told him, before smiling a little bit shakily at Chat. "His curfew's midnight tonight, and he's only allowed to be late if there's an akuma making the streets unsafe. And Chat?"

"Yes, madame?"

"We have a perfectly good balcony off the living room. Next time, please use it."

"... Yes, madame."

Her smile firmed up. "Have fun, dears."

Chat stared, ears flat in his shock. What. _What_ . What kind of parent just... just _let_ their kid go off like that? And gave them that late of a curfew at fifteen? Just a 'have fun dears' and nothing else?

"We going? Or, um, should I have gone out the front and met you on the roof or something...?"

Chat shook the astonishment off and turned to Nino. "No, you're fine." He had not thought this through. "Just... climb on," he said, sliding off the railing and onto the inside of the little ledge, turning to face away from Nino. "We'll go over the rooftops to avoid the tourists."

"... If you're sure, dude."

He had _really_ not thought this through. Nino's (large, warm) hands slid tentatively over his shoulders (Plagg no why are you letting temperature through), then Nino's (warm, rangy) body pressed up against Chat's back, and Nino hopped up to catch his legs around Chat's hips. Chat's tail coiled across Nino's back and under his seat a bit like a seatbelt (Plagg no).

Nino's breath was warm against the side of Chat's neck and on his human ear.

He turned again, leapt straight up, and caught the decorative brickwork above Nino's window. Then he climbed, with Nino pressed firm and warm against him like the world's (best) heaviest backpack.

"Which way?" he asked as he vaulted over the top ridge and onto the roof.

"Er. Fourth Arrondissement."

Chat nodded and headed east.  


-0-0-0

"Hey, you like Japanese?" Nino asked near the edge of the arrondissement.

"... I suppose." Chat had only had it maybe half a dozen times, more to learn the rules of etiquette for future dealings with his father's Tokyo contacts than for the flavor of the food. But Japanese restaurants were a bit highbrow for Nino...? They didn't do takeout.

"Go over about a block," Nino said, tapping Chat's right shoulder to indicate direction. "There's a little grocery, I can pick up some bento." _What was a bento?_ Chat wondered. "What kind of stuff do you like? Fried stuff? Teriyaki? Vegetarian?"

Chat didn't answer for a second, focused on skidding down a sloped roof without dropping Nino. "I don't eat fried things very much," he admitted once his boots hit level tile once more. "Or sweets."

"You wanna?"

He did. "... No," Chat said reluctantly. "I'll probably get sick."

"Fair enough." Nino pressed close to point down at a small shop a few doors up from the corner. The place was lit up brightly under a blue awning, the backlighting making it too hard to read whatever lettering might be on the awning. Chat found a drainpipe on the other side of the road and slid down it, stopping a story up where awnings and tree branches left a shadowed spot between a pair of darkened windows. "Drop me off here, I'll see what they've got left." And he slid off Chat's back, letting Chat catch him by the hands and lower him to the sidewalk from a story up, leaving Chat's back cold from nape to tail. "Be right back!"

Chat watched Nino head into the brightly-lit store and vanish, and strongly considered dropping the transformation to get his phone out so he could look up bento and Irish music venues. He did have cheese for Plagg, and he hated going in blind... but no. No, he did not need his phone or Google right now. He didn't.

Besides, he only had one round of emergency Camembert on him. What if there was an akuma?

(Please don't let there be an akuma tonight.)

A chilly breeze ruffled Chat's hair, bringing with it the scent of old snow, and Chat shivered a little. The suit was fine, but it didn't cover his head, and Nino had been so warm...

He was not thinking about that.

He pushed a bit further back into the shadows, lowering his eyes to minimize the gleam of reflected light. Not that any of the few passersby were looking up-- they were all ducked into thick dark coats, some with knit hats and some with hoods up, but all of them were watching their footing rather than looking for lingering superheroes.

Nino returned shortly with a heavy plastic bag slung over his arm. "Chat?" he whispered upwards. "Hey, Chat!"

Chat bent down, lifted Nino up and onto his back once more, and returned to the rooftops to head east again.

"There," Nino said about ten minutes later. "The Green Finch."

Chat caught himself none-too-gently on a chimney atop the building across the street from the pub. Nino's weight shifted against his shoulder, making balancing more difficult, but Chat just dug his claws into the brick and let it take most of their weight.

Here, several streets crossed each other in one of the broad intersections that made the modern city so easy to invade. The Green Finch curled halfway around the short edge of a building that was somewhat more octagonal than square; a brewery held the other corner, facing a small park. The two pubs didn't seem to be making much distinction between each other right now. and even from here, the crowd looked intimidatingly dense and rowdy, milling about and spilled half into the street. Chat's sensitive ears couldn't pick up any music over the raucous mix of French, English, and laughter.

There were empty balconies on the pub's side of the street, and something that might be an attic vent Chat could break in through. It might just be an odd shadow, though. The angle wasn't good to see that part of the roof from here.

"... There's another place in the 3rd," Nino offered. "Trooper Thorn's. Or some, like, smaller places a bit closer, but they aren't really set up for full bands."

"I'm fine with Thorn's," Chat said. "You aren't that heavy."

He regretted saying that for about half a second, passing over the Centre Pompidou. Adrien considered the complex fun to parkour around, but it was hideous and gave their father a distinctly unpleasant twitch at the corner of his eye. 'Like the architect turned the building inside-out to get to the chewy Super Mario center', as Adrien had once put it.

It least the building's venting blasted nice, warm air up as Chat ran across the garish blue piping on the roof. Nino twitched hard, one hand vanishing from Chat's chest to catch at the brim of his hat, but neither hat nor civilian fell, so it was fine.

Trooper Thorn's was also a corner bistro, but unlike The Green Finch it was surrounded by courtyards and construction scaffolding. Its doors were wide open, tents and tables out on the sidewalk and doing a brisk business like it was high summer, and cheerful music had the wait staff and (far less rowdy-drunk) customers alike bouncing almost unconsciously to the beat.

Chat and Nino landed atop a high stone platform right at the edge of the tents, one that afforded considerable privacy and a decent... whatever the word for view was when it was music instead of visuals.

Some city planner in the reconstruction days of Napoleon had apparently decided not to raize a medieval fountain to the ground for the sake of connecting two buildings at a street corner, and some later, more environmentally-minded one had planted tall, slender pines wherever a flagstone could be removed without affecting foot traffic. The result: a two-story-tall stone plinth easily large enough to fit a car on top, surrounded by thick greenery above and with water bubbling from the carved jars of Grecian-robed stone women below. The construction scaffolding just provided an extra layer of privacy, with plastic blocking the view from upstairs apartments all around.

Their luck in getting this place was... suspiciously, ridiculously good. Chat didn't trust it one bit.

"Man, I shoulda just started with this place, right?" Nino asked, plonking down onto the cold stone cheerfully and digging into his bag. "I'd forgotten about the fountain. Here, dinner."

Bento turned out to be trays packed tightly with food. The one Nino offered to Chat held sticky rice garnished with black sesame seeds, a couple tiny compartments of vegetables -- black shreds of something studded with bright green edamame beans in one, and a few small crudites in the other -- some sort of neon yellow disks on a piece of green plastic on the rice, and a larger compartment where a slice of teriyaki salmon lay with half a croquette atop a bed of shredded cabbage and lettuce.

Nino's, Chat saw as he took his own, had a mix of various tempura and a slice of thick, pale omelet in its larger compartment. It had the same rice and vegetables, though, and the neon yellow disks. Nino also had a second, much smaller tray of flattened pink lumps wrapped in dark, oak-like leaves, which he set aside between them.

The last items Nino pulled out of the bag were small cans, two in each hand. Green tea, oolong, coffee, and latte coffee. "Pick your poison?" he offered.

Chat took the black coffee first, and nearly dropped it for being hot. He caught it with a painful squeak of claws on metal, but luckily didn't shred the can open, so he could live with it. "Your turn," he said with a good approximation of aplomb, and hoped Nino would take the latte.

He did, and then let Chat take the green tea, which also was hot. "This is rather brilliant," Chat murmured as he opened the tea and his bento. Hot drinks that were fully portable, not just lidded. No giving a barista an order and having to wait on it, either. Just grab, pay, and go. He tried the mysterious neon yellow disks in the bento, and found them to be some sort of sharp, crisp pickle.

It was like his appetite had needed the tart shot of brine to wake up. Suddenly, Chat was ravenous, and started taking little bites of everything in the bento.

"Good, huh?"

It really was. Chat was used to highly skilled chefs making small portions of complicated food, but this was good in an entirely new way. "Very," he replied.

"Yeah, I think so too." And Nino dug into his own bento, chopsticks plucking delicately at the tempura. "Mmph." He swallowed. "I try to go look up a new thing every couple of weeks. Glad to get to share it."

Huh. "You don't with--" Adrien "--your moblin friend?"

"Adrien? I try, that's why Jadzia knows him at the tapas place, but he's still getting his head around getting to eat jambon-beurre. You're a bit pickier."

True. Not that he'd made it much of a secret, the way he must've been looking at the street dumplings the other day. But for Nino to be noticing...

Chat cast around for a new topic. "I'm surprised your mother let you come out with me." Wait. "She does think I'm an adult, right?"

Nino blinked. "Well, yeah, I guess, maybe. I didn't tell her you weren't if that's what you're asking. But like, dude, you're a superhero, she probably figures if you're not safe to be around who is, you know?"

"And the curfew?"

"Got church in the morning. Friday's a bit later." Chat gaped at Nino. It took a moment for Nino to notice, then pause and shrug. "I'm also only allowed to be out that late if it's music stuff. If I were just partying or whatever, I'd be grounded so fast my head would spin." He rested his head on his hand and grinned a little bit sheepishly at Chat. "I've got aspirations, you see. Songwriter, music mixer... composer if I was going the classical route, but there's weird classist stuff there, like if you write pop it doesn't count. Which is stupid."

"And you just... go out for music all the time."

"Yep."

"When on earth do you do your homework?"

Nino's grin went even more awkward. "On buses and stuff, mostly. My grades don't have to be perfect, just passing."

That explained _so much_. Nino's parents were insane.

"So hey, thanks, by the way." Chat glanced back at Nino. "Don't think I said that yet," Nino explained.

Chat looked away. His bento was just fascinating. Really. The back of his neck wasn't going oddly warm. "It's not like it's an inconvenience." See, look, I wasn't doing anything important, the music isn't horrible, and you got me dinner.

"Well... y'know..." Nino said slowly, something odd enough about his tone -- shy, almost -- that Chat couldn't help but peek sidelong at the boy. Who was rubbing the back of his own neck and looking somewhere vaguely skywards and away. "If you want to be not-inconvenienced again, I know a whole bunch of little places..."

What. That sounded like... _what_. "Are you asking me out?" Chat asked incredulously.

"Maybe," Nino said. Then, more firmly, "Yeah."

Right, it was not just Nino's parents who were mad. "You don't know who I am," Chat pointed out. "You _can't_ know."

"Yeah, I know. It's not safe." Nino's eyes met Chat's. "And we can't go out like normal people, everything would have to be secret and sneaking around for the same reason. But I like you. So."

Chat stared. "... It's really just that simple to you?"

"Trying? Yeah. But Yoda's wrong." What. "Do or do not is for hindsight. All you can do in the moment is try. And yeah, maybe it doesn't work, but what if it does?"

What if, indeed. "If it works," Chat said slowly, "you'll be a target."

Nino shrugged. "No more than everybody else in Paris," he replied before pausing. Then, "Well, no, I lie. No more than Chloe Bourgoise in general," he corrected, fairly enough since Chloe did seem to get targeted more often than the rest of their school, "and I'm kind of already a target for Alya. The Ladyblogger, you know." Nino smiled a bit. "She's my girl-bestie, it's great."

Great was not the word Chat would've chosen. He'd seen Alya's idea of a playful interview.

"And besides," Nino tried, "if I get akumatized again -- not that we even know if that's a thing -- what am I going to do? Trap you in a bubble? You guys already beat me, you know how it works."

He had a point there. "You've really thought this through," Chat said.

Nino made an amused little noise in his throat. "Yeah, no, I'm totally winging it here," he admitted. "I'll still show you around town if you want, though, even if you don't wanna make it datey. Just so you know. No pressure."

... Nino honestly looked like he'd be okay with that. Just a slightly nervous smile and loose body language, eyes crinkled behind his glasses and reflecting tiny pinpricks of the fairy lights below. The almost-forgotten music seemed to spin around them, happy and infectous, and Nino's eyes drooped half-shut to hear better, like he had all the time in the world for Chat to decide.

"... Okay."

Nino lit up in delight, and although this was _complete idiocy_ , Chat couldn't bring himself to regret it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Felix, your excuses are getting too flimsy to hold up anymore.
> 
> jambon-beurre: ham sandwich with butter, one of the most popular sandwiches in France


End file.
